The problem the US has is that it's opponents LIE about it's capabilities while the US has the resources to MEET those lies just look at the F-15, thanks to Soviet lies about the Migs capabilities, the US had 50 YEARS of uncontested air dominance.

Hah. I love that little piece of military history. They were so freaked out they created an aerial wunderwaffen only to have a defector give them one and they went "wait, that's it?"

The thing is, understanding the 'why' of military technology requires a broad knowledge of a lot of other capabilities in military technology, almost all of which is outside the scope of any normie's experience, but christ, even Elon fucking Musk was shitting on the F-35 last November and said we should replace it with drones.

You'd think the guy whose ventures involve a lot of electronic communications would understand the biggest problem with using drones in a hostile threat airspace, namely, electronic warfare (or even anti-satellite kinetic warfare) taking out the drone command signals. AI technology isn't advanced enough to operate in the power, size, and performance limits of a small drone, and a drone that just executes pre-existing commands is called a 'cruise missile' and we already have those.

The SATCOM link on the MQ-9 is incredibly fragile. Do you remember those videos of the Russian jets fucking around with them? Every time the jet flew over the radome, they dropped video link for a few seconds. The fighters were over the radome for a fraction of a second and even that was enough to completely blank the signal out and it needed to reacquire.

It's incredibly frustrating watching something that is truly obscure knowledge be commented on by every single dump-truck-driving redneck with an opinion, when one actually has that expertise and knowledge firsthand.

Also, if you wanted to make a drone with the capabilities of an F-35, it'd just be an F-35 with a pile of incredibly expensive hardware strapped into the cockpit that would lose link every time it inverted, it'd cost more than the F-35 does now, and it would lose every single aerial engagement because it would have a ridiculous signal delay between something happening, the pilot seeing it in his ground control station, the pilot responding, and the aircraft accepting that response. The speed of light is fast, but we can't even play video games in Europe without lag being a make-or-break factor in your performance.

PS: And to nip this one in the bud, the limiting factor of g-forces on aircraft is usually the weapons, not the squishy man in the cockpit. A drone fighter wouldn't be able to pull more gs than a normal fighter. For one, high-g maneuvers means you're dumping all your airspeed. That's what the feeling g-forces is, all that momentum basically being 'wasted'. And second, if we magically could "actually" build aircraft to higher g-tolerances, but for some reason we do not, we already would do so to avoid the very real damage high-g maneuvers already cause to aircraft. A human can survive a 10-g turn, but the aircraft cannot, so why would a drone? When the pilot over-gs the aircraft, he'll land back at the airfield completely healthy. It's the aircraft that's now all bent and fucked up.