I wonder if unmanned but not independent aircrafts are just too risky to rely on them completely. If the adversary develops a successful jamming attack (or whatever, idk anything about this) it denies the country to operate in the area completely.
With all the effort being put into full self driving cars I would think a full self flying plane would be a lot easier with a lot less edge case scenarios than driving on a road with other users.
You would think wrong. There are no full self-driving cars today. All of them rely to some extent on human operators, either in the car or remote.
Sure it's possible to build a drone that can take off, fly to a designated point, drop some ordnance, and return. But we don't have the technology to automate complex missions like air superiority or close air support. Those require a human in the loop making real time decisions. If the human isn't right there in the airplane then the risk is that communications will be disrupted. In a major conflict with a near peer adversary, most of our communications satellites will get knocked out.
