agree with most of above: drones win.
F-whatever. train and have a few.
masses of drones will beat one F-up.
Ehhh, infrastructure wins.
Whoever has the funding to back drones or fighters with the support staff, cyberops, networking, maintenance techs, awacs, etc wins.
If the generals(all pilots) keep us in manned planes, but keep all the infrastructure behind it, it doesn't matter.
Drones are their own headache.
Let me run a scenario by you:
Let's say you want to use a squadron of drones, say, 20 drones. You will need to stream the video from the drone continuously, without lag, and be able to, again without lag, operate the drone.
Let's say its 720p. So, we probably need to wirelessly transmit, what 10gbps from hundreds/thousands of miles away in real time. Multiply that by 20.
How are you going to do that reliably on a large scale?
That is the issue at the moment.
Satellite has latency, and is not particularly fast. Prone to interference. Can possibly be attacked by other satellites/missles.
Something like Alphabet's Loon, high altitude balloons could be used. Again, have to worry about all the above problems.
Maybe drones gliding continuously at near orbit? This could work, would need many drones to provide coverage, and you'd need to come up with an entirely new networking protocol to switch between access points dozens of miles in the air moving thousands mph.
And then you've got to think about cyber operations involving them, electronic countermeasures affecting the drones directly or the signals coming to them. Man in the middle attacks on the signal. Programming the drones to work if connection is lost(do you program a robot to kill?).
A drone is great. Many drones are a networking nightmare.
Drones will eventually replace manned airplanes. Working on an Air Force base, I don't think it will happen any time soon. I could be wrong(civilian intern).