I still don’t understand why a very long range, big internal payload, high subsonic capabale, multimission UAV is an inferior choice to F/A-XX.
Does a USN officer need to be in situ for the action for mission authority or latency reasons?
It's not the range, payload, speed or modular capability that is the limiting factor. It's the command and control and the cost that is probably the more limiting factor.
1. A non-autonomous drone can be rendered mission incapable with jamming or destruction of control nodes so I won't go further into that.
An autonomous drone is still mission capable on its own. However, autonomous drones still function a lot more like ChatGPT would to a user - it's a force multiplier for the general case it encounters, but it will perform poorly in edge cases. No matter how much you program for edge cases, there are and will continue to be edge cases that you don't account for. On the other hand, humans tend to be a lot better at things that are confounding still for AI.
The cost of not performing well against an edge case can be as trivial as losing an engagement or the air frame or as bad as shooting down a neutral air liner or bombing a village at peacetime.
2. Drones still doesn't negate the costly requirements that makes a superior aircraft. You still have sensors, materials and software. They still need maintenance and updates (particularly software). A highly capable drone still won't be more numerous or that much cheaper than a manned aircraft and as it sits right now, given the state of command and control, you still won't squeeze nearly as much performance out of an UAV.
3. Lastly, you still need stand in, real time sensors especially when your major communication nodes are going to not always be accessible. As good as generative AI is, it's still not going to be capable of rapidly and adaptively employing counter tactics that doesn't fall within its general cases. Which means the most effective strategies are going to be guaranteed by direct, un-jammable communications to human controlled aircraft within, say a laser data-link's range.
The more likely use cases for CCAs or any autonomous UAVs are something like:
1. The CCA gets told to go somewhere to attack something and leave the maneuver and positioning to the onboard autonomy
2. The CCA searches and acquires targets that are synthesized into a broad picture, the human decides on which targets are cleared to be engaged, and the CCA mob decides which one has the right speed, position, and load out to go get the task done while which ones are going to be performing the support for the attackers.
3. In very very rare cases with highly limited rules of engagement / geographic areas, a pack of CCAs can be sent in and let lose on whatever is moving without any human oversight - say a particular strait between an island and a mainland. Do note that if you aren't able to get into contact with that group of CCAs beyond that point, they very well might do horrifying things that you didn't plan for. If one of your manned aircraft has a malfunctioning IFF transponder and you've driven into a roving hoard of CCAs, well - tough luck for you then.
