The platform I think will decide future air superiority is actually fairly well evidenced here. There definitely will be a need for high-performance/agile airc

The platform I think will decide future air superiority is actually fairly well evidenced here. There definitely will be a need for high-performance/agile aircraft, but I don't know that it will be the traditional fighter pilot. The main reason is that the presence of a pilot creates an inherent limitation in performance - you have to protect a sack of meat/bones/blood from G-forces, etc. With that in mind, I could see missiles that are extremely maneuverable and could spend a long amount of time tracking and eventually destroying a target (such as an enemy fighter plane). At a higher level, one of the most interesting weapons of the cold war was the Phoenix missile. Designed for the A-12 (precursor to the SR-71), it was high-Mach missile that would launch, go to high altitude, power off and then lance down from above into the target. F-14's carried the missiles and were quite capable of removing a large number of targets at well beyond visual range (a "standoff" missile iirc). The biggest limitation was that the missiles required constant illumination by the fighters for their targeting solutions, which meant an opposing flight could attempt to close the distance to their own range before the missiles struck (or escape the terminal envelope). While I'm a bit out of date on current AAM tech, I think we'll probably see missiles capable of this same type of performance but at even greater ranges and altitudes. A larger standoff-fighter that is capable of extremely high-altitudes (90k+ feet) that can loiter there could conceivably carry a large number of missiles well away from the threat zone - over an international border for instance - while still having target/kill capability. 500-mile range AAM anyone? Fascinating stuff.