alt Hacker NewsStealth is less effective against long range radar, stealth is more effective closer in against targeting radars.
When you're high up you can have pretty long 'line of sight' so it's not unreasonable that these could fly way way ahead. 100 miles and way more is not unreasonable.
You basically get 'double standoff'.
I can see this as being almost as effective as manned stealth and if they are cost effective they could very plausibly defeat f22 scenarios.
Once you add in the fact that risk is completely different (no human), then payload, manoeuvrability, g-force recovery safety, all that goes out the window and you have something very crazy.
3 typhoons with 2-3 'suicidal AI wingmen' each way out ahead is going to dust them up pretty good at minimum. It's really hard to say for sure obviously it depends on all the other context as well.
That may be true, but it seems to strengthen the case for moving the human out of the forward cockpit rather than keeping them there.
If the unmanned aircraft are the ones flying far ahead, taking the risk, and extending the standoff envelope, then why is the human still sitting in the forward fighter rather than supervising from a safer node further back?
At that point it seems like the architecture is optimizing for tactical latency and current doctrine, not necessarily for the cleanest end-state.