Autonomous drones do not need pilots and they can function under the same intelligence conditions that pilots do. If a pilot lose GPS they are no more capable of adapting that a properly written AI. They also do not get sick, retire or have mental issues. The same revolution that has affected everything else in society will inevitably come to fighter aircraft. Surely you don't think we will have self-driving cars and still rely on human pilots for our fighters. The tactical advantages of humanless flight alone are undeniable.
Oh yes...we've seen such genuflecting worship of the hopes of future technology before - and then gotten rude awakenings from the experience of today. After Korea, 'future thinkers' were confident that maneuverable aircraft were a thing of the past and that electronics made gun fights history. For those worshipers of tech, the key was straight-line air speed and the air to air missile shot, right? After a painful lesson in Vietnam of poor missile reliability, and ponderous unsuitable dogfighters they rightly learned they got it all wrong...only then maneuverability and guns were back in the F-15 and F-16.
Then there was the F-111 debacle, the Brainiac's under McNamara whose bright idea it was to make a universal fighter bomber for all the services to "save money" (remind of us something current?). They ended up with a plane so badly compromised that only one service saw any use for it only in a bomber role, and learned to live with it's compromises.
And yet here we are again, with a high-maintenance, overpriced, jack of all trades (and master of none) F-35. It's goals of cost-cutting and commonality has also crashed, and our eggs are all in one newer technology...stealth.
And the latest fad that is supposed to save us "drones", which will most assuredly, find them oversold and underperforming.
In and since WWII the American military and civilian culture has one prevailing strength undermined by another constantly growing weakness - a military that relies on a huge industrial capacity and massive material expenditure on firepower so as to avoid large causalities over a lengthily war. In WWII, heavy material expenditure for heavy firepower (e.g. artillery) prevailed, and the same philosophy was used in Korea and Vietnam.
But those days are over. We no longer have massive domestic merchant shipping to support our logistics and our industrial production "base" is the likes of "facebook" and "twitter" and "netflix". The US doesn't have the power available it had in the Iraq war, which itself was a shadow of the forces available in the prior gulf war. Whereas at one time the US had a 1 1/2 war strategy (Europe and Asia), today its not even a 1/2 war military . It would be impossible, for example, for the US to fight a Vietnam sized war.
So rolling the dice on "future technology" against a constantly advancing, accelerating, and technologically gifted people in China isn't going to cut it. There is a point were quantity is .more important than quality, and where quality of the weapon is more important than facebook, diversity training, and "the cloud".
The next war ain't gonna be won by twitter my friend, time we faced up to it.