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Are you saying the unmanned fighters kicked @ss on the manned ones? I find that hard to believe.

I don't know what information has been made publicly available, but I'll just say that it shook up a lot of people and given the technology of the time, it was impressive, and they proved that when you take the human out of the cockpit, you can do some pretty amazing maneuvers that a human can't physically deal with from an offensive or defensive perspective. It's simple physics and simple biology. 20mm cannon are pretty useless in such situations because a non-human adversary can do things a human physically cannot do, and such engagements are incredibly rare in modern aerial combat anyways. Believe me, the USAF and USN and all of the other major players have been doing everything they can to help human beings pull just one or two more Gs, and they have run into the proverbial brick wall time and time again.

And we're just talking here about finding their way around, not actually engaging highly motivated adversary pilots in modern aircraft.

A human pilot can be highly motivated by their survival instincts, but at their core they are still a bag of fluids that is susceptible to the laws of physics and human biology.

And those "highly motivated adversary pilots in modern aircraft" are still basically flying a missile platform that just happens to have guns on it and they are liable to be firing the same types of missiles that a UAV is firing.

And if you want to bring up going to 20mm, out of our best modern example, the first Gulf War where we had a well-equipped adversary that was in fact able to shoot down some of our aircraft, only two Iraqi aircraft out of 40+ that were shot down, were shot down by cannon fire, and those happened to be A-10s shooting down helicopters with their 30mm Gatlings. There weren't Americans and Brits taking on Iraqis with their 20mm, it was allies and Iraqis going at it with missiles. All of the hits the Iraqi pilots got on our aircraft also happened to be missiles.

But we're still missing a major factor, which you bring up:

Still, sever the comm links and presto, you've got yourself a cruise missile flying on inertial guidance and computerized topo maps.

Going back to the best example we have of modern aerial warfare involving the US and a well-equipped adversary is the first Gulf War.

Who went in first? Cruise missiles and F-117s dropping bombs. Those F-117s weren't dogfighting the Iraqis, they were sneaking in and dropping bombs. Then only after they did their work did the air superiority fighters come in.

Out of the over 600-700 aircraft the Iraqis had, we shot down just over three dozen in air-to-air combat. The vast majority that were destroyed, were destroyed on the ground. We're talking probably 9 or 10 to 1 destroyed on the ground versus destroyed in the air.

This was over 20 years ago. If we go to war against an adversary that is well equipped, guess what? Same thing as before, cruise missiles and stealth will be in the first wave or two. They are going to be suppressing air defenses and airfields just like before, except that they are going to be better.

Aerial superiority is no longer just about who has the best pilots or best aircraft, it's about things like denying the enemy their airfields and fuel. We're damn good at it, and we've only gotten better since the first Gulf War.