There are cheaper alternatives to expensive stealthy manned designs. But they are not traditional and do not have strong well funded advocates. Bombers no longer have to come even close to their targets in order to drop a precision bomb. Drones have proven effective as fighters as much as thirty years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrT2KtSzMd0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_HiMAT
“Drones have proven effective as fighters as much as thirty years ago.”
Drones will not fill the fighter role for quite some time. Autonomy (Artificial Intelligence) is not there yet. Datalinks are not sufficiently trustworthy, etc.
I think what you’re going to see is that Stealth Fighters will be combined with some sort of “missile truck”. The fighter will ‘mark the target’ and the shooter will take them out. A semi-stealthy drone might reasonably be expected to fill that role.
In addition, newer weaponry, specifically smaller rail gun and directed energy weapons, will have an incredible and dramatic effect on air borne platforms. It is damned hard to outrun or outmaneuver a railgun projectile.
Um... no.
As a UAS design engineer, this is a factually incorrect statement: One that I spend far too much time trying to stamp out.
All UAS are sitting ducks in the crosshairs of manned aircraft.
While there are some low observable UAS fielded, once a manned aircraft detects it or it's identified from ground resources, it's toast; they fly via way-points due to communications and instruction lag, not via joystick.
As a note, if you see an operator of a UAS using a joystick, he is either the mission package operator or the UAS is taking off/landing and the operator/pilot is local to the UAS.