I haven’t the slightest doubt about the scenario you painted; the 9 is NOT a fighter, nor will it ever be.
Are you confident that there will be no uninhabited airframes in the air-to-air role in 15 year’s time...? My guess is that 3 or more countries will have multiple models acting in that capacity.
Standby terms like “ingress” and “egress” will have to be rethought; stealthy fighters will stay on station much more persistently. Fewer will be needed, and pilots will be called on for key decision-making steps only as those airframes encounter targets —they will then go back into an automated patrol mode, requiring no man in the loop for those long, dull stretches.
Later, some might need a pilot in the loop only at key junctures to assuage legal requirements, another area that will require considerable tweaking.
We are in the BEGINNNING, a little bit like when WWI biplanes acted in the recon role, later dropping crude fused bomblets by hand, and then later....??
AI research hasn’t really been going much of anywhere lately. There haven’t been any really major breakthroughs in over a decade.
I’m pretty confident that there will still be manned airframes in front-line air to air fighting in 20 years, let alone 15. The people that say that the AI drone will replace the manned fighter in that time frame are the same kind of people that said that the missile rendered guns on fighters obsolete in the 50s. We all know how well that worked out when the gunless F-4 appeared. Yeah, not so well.
It wasn’t until 40 years later that missile actually began to actually be able to get close to the promise made by the “gunless” advocates.