Real life is different...
MUM-T troops in Afghanistan could scarcely command more than two drones at a time, provided the Longbow was sitting back and not engaged in action, and that was up to the gunner and pilot working together. One drone was doable if the Longbow was flying around but it could hardly do battle. No drones in combat because use of the robotic AH-6 required the full attention span of the gunner/pilot crew.
It's why the MUM-T drones were used explicitly as vanguards for detection of targets to be destroyed by the Longbows. Modern ones just use Grey Eagles that can fly in a circle and pipe the sensors back to the helicopter, because it turns out the Little Bird drone helicopter was a bad idea.
Right. That was a terrible implementation.
Since then we have had MQ-8 Fire Scouts and even the MQ-24 K-MAX. We also have various quadcopters that are capable of stationkeeping to their control handheld, while relaying FPV video at 4k resolution. As civilian available systems.
A combat fighter pilot has a much greater attention span debt than a combat helicopter pilot though. He can't simply stop and hide behind a hill while talking to a pair of drones. They need to be literally autonomous and able to conduct strike missions on their own, much like human pilots, and this will necessarily entail hitting things like civilians misidentified as combatants, or civilians identified as racially/ethnically Chinese (thus, "the enemy" and a valid target), or whatever targeting parameters the neural network discerns from a given dataset and its labels.
Drones today require essentially constant manned babysitting. Some can be trusted to fly in a straight line without getting lost. This is something a backseater would do in a better designed aircraft than JSF. It's something the pilot will need to juggle, along with everything else, in the JSF.
Like I said, I suspect that it will result in an Oh, Shit moment for the USAF and development of 2-seater versions of the F-35A and -C, with the Marines having to suck it up or rely on either the VFAXX or FA-18Fs or Growlers to manage the drones.
In practice I suspect the USAF will rely on, if it ever gets the idea of using UCAS in the first place, Air Battle Managers controlling UCAS like ordinary fighters and using them to replace the fighter-bomber job of the JSF. This would free JSFs up to do F-22's job of OCA/DCA. It would also put the least pressure on the poor single-seat fighter pilots.
That's important because the USAF is at a deficit of about 600 frontline tactical fighters aka ATF, which it hopes to make up with 1,700 JSFs and several hundred F-15/F-16, but right now it's looking like it will have a deficit of both JSFs and ATFs, and probably of F-15EX as well. Eliminating the bomb truck mission from JSF means it will be able to do ATF's job, albeit poorly. Because it's a stealth A-7, not a stealth F-15, thus it's probably not the best at maneuvering in BVR. So it goes...
If the robotic aircraft is smart enough to find targets on its own, destroy them, and return to base, it can probably be trusted to two or three per JSF, at best. If it isn't, then it's not worth much, because no JSF driver will be able to operate a drone and fly a jet at the same time, which is impossible. Which is why the robotic aircraft needs to be smart enough to kill things on its own and not be expected to wait for a man-in-the-loop decision to tell it to kill things.
That's kind of the point of a loyal wingman...
A CCA/loyal wingman isn't going to be a panacea, but it will certainly reduce the "virtual attrition" of JSF put into JDAMing/SDBing armor columns, and let them do more important things like killing enemy bombers and protecting own bombers.
The drones need to get to the point of needing as much pilot interaction as arming and dropping a JDAM. "Select weapon/drone, select target coordinates, wait for light to go green or whatever the "target locked" indicator is for the JDAMs, pull trigger."
If the drones are something that has the same rough range as the F-22/F-35/NGAD, the pilot can do a lot of the prep work on the ground. Pre-defining groups between "escort" and "strike", setting up the recon bird(s) to automatically fly the bomb damage assessment run about 25-50mi behind the strike package to give any secondary explosions time to settle, etc. Basically a bigger pre-flight.
Maybe they'll bring back the robotic teammate for B-21 at some point though.
That I doubt, the cockpit doesn't make as much of a % of the total load in a plane that size, and I don't think anyone is comfortable with the idea of a nuclear armed drone.
Could definitely see the B-21 acting as the quarterback for the smaller drones we have mooted for the CCA program. As is, the F-15EX is the likely quarterback for the job until the two-seat F-35s show up.
Though I need to add that right now, the proposed drones are a
missile truck, an EW platform, and a recon unit. No bomb truck proposed so far, and I have no clue why.
