http://aviationweek.com/defense/opinion-defining-next-fighter

And it was Rokossovsky who said: “It isn’t how many you can kill before losing but how many you can lose whilst still winning.”
It all sounds great but body bags don’t play well on television and politicians abhor the use of tools which could deny them the next election. Had Hitler had to deal with such limiters as true knowledge of the failures of his campaigns; he would have fought particularly the Russian campaign FAR differently.
Look at a map of the Ukraine and Russia. What do you see? A vast desolation. A waste. In the spring and fall, the Raspu****ya turn all roads to sludge and the only ‘all weather transit artery’ are rail roads. Cut those lines and you win. Leave them be to fix your own position around regional COGs and you will be killed as you become predictable. Pushing a ‘Hitler screwed up because of superior German hardware, bought in too few numbers’ argument is a fools game. As an illustration the summer after the massive defeats of Operation Typhoon around Moscow, a much weakened single German Corps, composed of just two, understrength, divisions, wiped out four equivalent, full strength, fresh, Asian divisions _with nothing but Pz.III/IV_ in it’s march to Stalingrad.
It then split itself, sending the armor units south into the Caucusus (mountains, just where tanks don’t belong) while investing the city but only from one side (unlike Warsaw and Krakow or the Yugoslav campaigns for example). The result was a slaughterhouse as the Russians transported materiel by rail and then barged it across the Volga.
Feeding just enough men and guns into the meatgrinder to forever keep the Germans cleaning out the infestations of conquered territory in the resultant rattenkrieg.
Had those tanks been put across the river and the bridgehead collapsed, Stalingrad would have fallen in weeks, not remained a stubborn festung for months. If those rail lines, indefensible across thousands of mile to a man with a stick of dynamite, had been cut the supplies would have never arrived.
Hitler’s failure in The East was one of underestimation. He went with established Soviet rather than older Czarist population data and thus thought he faced an enemy of ‘only’ 120 million when it was in fact closer to 200 million (something Himmler discovered by the time of his Posen speech, in 1943). Had he known, of the greater numbers involved, he might have done more to quarter and divide his enemy, isolating him. Or he might have gone via the southern route and Palestine into Turkey where he could threaten Stalin’s Crimean oil directly.
As this applies to airpower, we are making the same dumb assumptions Hitler did: of an enemy as a frontal rather than theater (holistic) ‘whole picture’ problem. Anyone facing Chinese or Russian threats has to be able to deal with the enablers to those threats across hundreds of thousands of square miles of battlespace. All while protecting their own forces and particularly base-in capabilities.
Human endurance, carrier launch/recovery cycling and the F2T2EA kill chain of subsonic air vs. hypersonic missiles such as the DF-21 and YJ-18 etc. make this ‘broad scope’ approach to cutting the enemy up impossible in a manned airframe. Kerosene has plateau’d in terms of energy thresholds and can only become more powerful (faster for a given volume etc.) by scaling up. This drives costs and vulnerability to threats as an F-105 vs. MiG-21 equivalent comparison. They only have to come 200nm and so they can afford to be small and ubiquitous.
With that in mind, what we NEED to do is start taking things /out/ of the system spec so that the design becomes massively lighter and the fuel burn (as engine size) can be altered to reflect persistent endurance measured in days.
If the cockpit tub and AI radar, together, form 5,000lbs of cyber and laser vulnerabilities on the front end, then their removal also empowers the extraction of another 5,000lbs of ‘fighter’ mission weight as burner and 9G empennage from the back end. Now, your ‘fighter’ weighs maybe 10,000lbs empty instead of 20-25,000lbs. If you have one engine, say the F112 from the AGM-129, which was the size of a lawn mower powerplant and yet provided 1,000lbf at .17 TSFC, and another which provides something closer to 20,000lbf, all of it military, you can give the jet 10,000lbs of fuel and STILL have a near 1:1 Thrust to Weight _at takeoff_.
That high installed thrust crosses huge transit segments of your ‘just another airliner’ mission radius at supersonic speeds, limiting the amount of time spent doing nothing. Before, in the mission area, you shut it down and go to this miniature engine with an IR signature smaller than a flash light and hang like a vulture, at 100-200 knots for 10-15 hours at a time.
If your unrefueled mission radius is now something nearer to 1,500-2,000nm you can adopt another Russian proverb, this time from Konev I believe: “Be Everywhere. And let the enemy defend accordingly. He will defend nowhere well.”
This too has an analogue in the WWII East where, at the height of the battles for Stalingrad, the Soviets, who had been picking at the edges of the German supply lines, leaped all over Rumanian and Hungarian units acting as flank security for those logistics trains and just mauled them to pieces.
Even as a German General, Hermann Balck, with a lonely division on the far end of that supply chain, killed an entire Soviet Army group and some 1,500 tanks, holding the southern flank of the Chir River. The center could not hold. And would not be allowed to evacuate.
We are in that position, today, with airpower. The center cannot hold because it is built around the limitations of manned airpower operating on a narrow frontal basis of fixed, focused, targeting.
And especially with netcentrics and digital battlefield stuff dispersing assets all over, that kind of approach simply will not work. Not like a robot can.
The key to making this paradigm shift is accepting that lasers are the way forward. And that there will be a _narrow_ window whereby 250KW airborne systems can both act against enemy aircraft and self-defend (along with MSDM hit to kill interceptors) against inbound missiles. But that men have no place in such an equipped vehicle. Both because the logical spot for a laser turret is where the canopy is now. And because that laser will blind and then fry a man seated in that cockpit, in a matter of seconds, from miles away.
Once you see this, it becomes obvious that 2MW surface lasers will follow and man will REALLY not have a place on airframes which have to be _assumed_ to have a 50% attrition rate, FNOW/FDOW against zero time of flight = never miss threats.
Those lasers will be here, by 2030. And the F-35 will have been in full service for less than 10 out of a 40 year service life. This is where we make the mistake of employing the many at the cost of a having a robust ability to accept attrition from even a few, technology leveraging, mega threats.
For manned airpower, it will be as it was when the asteroid took out the dinosaurs at the KT boundary. Everywhere and then…nothing.

is the Reaper low on payload?
I’ve seen plenty of jets flying missions over Libya and Syria with just one or two bombs
granted these usually flew from long distances, but I imagine pound/cost per flight hour the Reaper still beats anything manned, except maybe a B-52

over Syria one could also revert to direct control or using a relay aircraft to control UAVs, avoiding expensive satellite links
those Iranian drones are a good example, I doubt they have satellite links

the other thing is loiter time
unarmed UAVs are great for keeping an eye on the enemy, and manned jet aircraft are great for scooting over and bombing them
but when the enemy launches a sudden assault, or tries to move, there is simply nothing that beats a UAV overhead instantly responding

micro weapons are definitely needed, Hellfire missiles must be the biggest waste of money on ammunition ever. like shooting nukes to kill a fly
they are working on laser guided 70 mm missiles
what does Iran use on its UAVs? is that laser guided or TOW?

any links? I know Russia is rather secretive on its drone programs