Does anyone know if electronic signal jamming of drone control telemetry is a significant threat?
What about a bad actor taking out the land bases control signal / antenna to disable flight control of the drone?
It seems very premature to proclaim unmanned drones will eliminate future need for manned military fighter aircraft.
Your point is valid and the threat is real. However people predicting the demise of all manned fighters are doing so based on expecting the F-22 and F-35 to last for another 20-30 years. We aren’t saying we can get rid of manned systems now, but they are saying manned systems will be obsolete in 20-30 years. The idea is this, yeah you can jam a drone and make it have to rely on internal systems and sensors... but even jammed it will out perform an manned system.
There are a number of directions technology could turn which would negate this trend and the trend is for TACTICAL systems. We may still require ‘drone mother ships’ that are manned and using unjam-able line of sight communication (laser link, etc). It is a fairly complex trade off analysis that says manned tactical platforms will go away. And they could still be proven wrong. 40 years ago they thought fighters did not need guns anymore. I expect the manned versus unmanned debate still has many surprises in store for us.