I like this idea. You could cut back the manned aircraft back =by half and replace it with twice the number of unmanned drones.
You'd still have to keep pilots and conventional transport and combat aircraft, because there are just some missions that couldn't be done any other way.
Correct. There are things drones do very well. long endurance Intelligence Surveillance and Recon (ISR) are sweet spots for sure. When it comes to boys in green in trouble though I want a guy looking down with eyeballs on, transport troops? No CO wants to tell a parent his child was killed by a robot aircraft software glitch.
Don't think drones are cheap and they still have a lot of issues. Predator loss rate run about 10/100,000 hours. This compares to the overall Navy rate of less than 1/100,000 hours in manned aircraft. That's class A's so it doesn't include combat losses. Numbers like that mean that the technical and operational maturity of drones is still quite low.
