It will be interesting to see more and more countries building cheap hi-tech military robotics.
This will probably chance the doctrines. In short term I'd guess fighters become more relevant as they are needed to identify large quantities of flying objects. At the same time manned bombers become less relevant. With cruise missiles anything is destroyable. And with surveillance robotics everything is becoming observable.
Probably land groups become smaller as they have to try to be "too cheap to attack". It's not economical to send 1,5 million dollar cruise missile to kill five soldiers. How you can organize whole military force to effectively do their jobs, while gatherings of more than 5 people to the same spot is forbidden?
I'd guess future camouflage is going to be something that confuses the difference between military and civilian. And decoys are going to be big trend. Something like using artillery to disperse large amounts of heat sources that look like humans to IR-camera.
The 1,5 million dollar missiles (and more expensive ones) will be used for destroying the command centres controlling the pilot-less planes. Most of them as current locations are known even now.
A flock of such air-crafts in a fleet formation if used for massive offensive action (like the Luftwaffe-style bombings in WW2) could be "switched off" with an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse in the most severe case. Besides this extremity - a distributed but single-coordination-and-control battery of modern ground mobile anti-aircraft defence rocket complexes can deal with tens to up to a few hundreds flying units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir-S1 ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K22_Tunguska).
I don't think that in the observable future these drones could be something more than a single-plane single-mission reconnaissance tool used strictly against technologically vastly inferior armies/societies.
I would envision "single-plane reconnaissance" -missions. Lot's of them done from very low tech command "centers". More like a Toyota Corolla with some guy and a laptop, than bunker with tens of people. They would provide lot's to do for enemy fighters, while locating targets for artillery. Pantsir-S1 and Tunguska both have limited weapon systems, only good for targets below 15km. And spotting something that flies just above the tree-line is quite hard with radar.
I'm not saying someone would attack U.S. with huge drone flock. I'm saying that soon deploying marines to some distant country is going to be somewhat riskier.
"Tunguska-M1 offers a 360-degree field of view, a detection range of around 18 km and can detect targets flying as low as 15 m"
"The specific feature of the Pantsir-S1 system is the combination of a multiple-band target acquisition and tracking system in conjunction with a combined missile and gun armament creating a continuous target engagement zone from 5 m height and 200 m range up to 10 km height and 20 km range, even without any external support".
My point is that in the near future you can't expect much from drones in real-action offensive missions - regardless where the hit should come (from the drone itself or from somewhere else where the drone relays the gathered info) - against an army with the relevant technical base to counter either the drone or the in-flying tactical rocket.
Of course, now they are quite OK and up to the task to chase Taliban guerilla fighters, "police" the sky, or something like that. On the longer-term perspectives I can't say anything.
I agree in large - though manned fighters will become irrelevant too. As it is - much of the time an F-35 pilot will not be actually looking outside, they'll be looking into their helmet screen. There's a good EO DAS video that shows the reasons why - though the only one I can find right now isn't of the best quality - http://youtu.be/CwvnhFgzIKI
So the pilot isn't actually controlling the flight surfaces, that is all fly by wire. And the pilot is not actually looking outside with the naked eye. So - really the only reason to have a pilot actually in the cockpit is if the side sending up the plane is worried they'll lose the ability to control it remotely.
"So - really the only reason to have a pilot actually in the cockpit is if the side sending up the plane is worried they'll lose the ability to control it remotely."
Well the only thing worse than losing your fighter to enemy force, is the enemy force controlling your fighter against you.
With current technology I'd say the best possibility is single manned fighter controlling few unmanned fighters with two-way highly encrypted optical link. So that when engaging enemy the pilot would just send one of the unmanned against a identified target, bit like a more maneuverable missile. Then the AI would kick in.
In the future something like electronic tunneling radio might do the job. I really don't believe in AI doing the whole thing, scenarios are too complex. And there has to be someone taking the responsibility.
Killing people and destroying stuff is why they exist. The threat of it is sometimes sufficient but history has shown that often they'll actually have to go out and do it.
Whether or not people agree with the reasons and the use of the force, that is a political question not a military question.
I lean towards pacifism myself - but to think that a military exists for other reasons is to muddy ones thinking and introduce bad data.
These drones are useless if you don't have the satellites that control them.
unless they plan on using it only under the satellite that they had recently launched.
I think this is propaganda without much truth to it - but you are correct that UAVs (currently) depend on a lot of infrastructure, especially satellites - gps and command/control stuff.
