The Last Jet Fighter ?

Sounds like a lack of forsight.

If you don't have air superiority, you loose.  When you take the man out of the machine you no longer have either the ability to make on the spot decisions (yes, I know live feed from drones is happening now), nor a reason to avoid combat and achieve resolution by other means.

The powers that be are looking for a push button military and eliminate the people on the ground, air and sea. 

As an aside, IMO, the F35 is going to turn out to be designed by committee, to be a jack of all trades and won't do any of them well.  What it started out as, it might have been alright, but now??????

While it's future planning, I believe the strategy is to be able to knock out opposition aircraft before they get airborne through the use of stealth,drones and standoff reconstituted bombers. Haven't read the white paper yet. But what a loss of subjects for the hobby in the future.

Shades of Dale Brown and Dreamland......... But even he still has the man (and woman) in the machine.

Sounds like th same mentality back when they built the F-4....all fighting wil be done with missilles, nobody uses guns anymore for air-to-air

that went well.

But at least they had the ability and sense to fix that without major changes to the airframe.......Looking at major design changes to the human form to get it in one of the new toys to fix that...........

Who needs a new fighter when you have no enemies?

Kind of reminds me of an old joke I heard a few times in the AF.  When they retire the last manned aircraft from the Air Force- they'll fly all the dignitaries there in a C-47.