Hang on. Has there ever been a high performance fighter drone? All the UAVs I've seen aren't particularly agile nor fast. A remotely controlled drone might be l

Hang on. Has there ever been a high performance fighter drone? All the UAVs I've seen aren't particularly agile nor fast. A remotely controlled drone might be limited in its performance by the lag time in input and output (first relay sensor data to operator and then wait for controller input). It's one thing to remotely pilot a drone loitering over a battlefield at 100 to 200 miles per hour and quite another to do it when they're going twice or three times that speed (not to mention above Mach 1 and super-cruising). Therefore a high performance drone must by necessity be AI controlled at the local level rather than wait for operator input. I'm not convinced that we will have AIs that smart (in addition to being able to make various decisions that are literally life or death) before this plane is being deployed. What you're proposing is basically trading one set of problems for another and 5th generation fighter planes have two, possibly three to four, working examples. A high performance fighter drone does not exist in reality as far as I know.