> Autonomous planes aren't particularly hard. It's mostly the price performance that needs attention. Cheap, autonomous drones already exist. Making them bigger

> Autonomous planes aren't particularly hard. It's mostly the price performance that needs attention. Cheap, autonomous drones already exist. Making them bigger and beefing up their abilities is just a matter of time. That's all there's to it. At some point their abilities encompass most of what fighter planes currently do. Currently the allure of drones is that they are very cheap and can perform some missions as well as their big expensive brothers. If you make a drone that is equally capable as a modern crewed jet, you bear most of the cost anyway. You’ll save something by excluding the pilot, but have to pay for extra (stealth) communication, infrastructure etc. Maybe we’ll go away from that, have many types of cheap drones that are specialised and disposable. That’s not the case now. Bear in mind our perception is skewed by the fact that the last N wars were all fought against at least one country far behind in military technology. But NATO et al are really prepping against a war against an equal. Having a cheap plastic drone with a bomb attached at the bottom won’t do.