Yes, but I'm not advocating running entire wars remotely. What I am saying is that we have hit two major walls with F-22 and by extension, manned fighters in general . Financial and performance. They are linked. F-22's performance has to be limited to account for the physical limitations of the pilot. So, we build a hyper expensive plane and then compromise performance to account for a pilot in the cockpit which is one of the things that made it expensive in the first place. You don't need AI entirely to run the plane. That could be done remotely with pilots either in a command center or at at a node somewhere. Your comment about bandwidth is right on the money. A much more robust system is needed. So, why not shift the resources into the com system? You'll get more aircraft, cheaper and that can can go faster, perform better and tie into far more assets? As an added bonus, the com system has lots and lots of commercial civilian utility.
How much farther can we really go with pilots?
Re: Performance & Bandwidth.
It depends on what kind of battlefield you’re anticipating.
For example, I really don’t like airplanes that depend on a computer for stability. Why? Because sooner or later, and I’m betting sooner, our enemies will field a missile that’s sorta like the old Genie atomic rocket except that it’ll have a magnetostrictive compression type EMP warhead in it.
Shoot the thing from BVR on inertial guidance and when it gets near the targets it’s either detonated by the launch plane or an AWACS or by timer. At that point, the electronics fry, and the pilot discovers what fun it is to try and bail out against all of those G forces. Worse still, we lose an irreplacable airplane. Not good.
That makes me pretty sure that we don’t dare put all of our eggs in one basket. Build a mix of manned aircraft, UAVs and autonomous combat systems. We could borrow a trick from the Iranians too, and send the UAVs ahead like they did their Phantoms, and use our super plane, whatever it ultimately winds up being, initially for battle management of the wave that goes in first.
I’d like to see more research into getting more commo for less bandwidth and I suspect that there are some smart guys on both sides who are burning the midnight oil on it.