Unmanned Drone vs Conventional Manned Fighter in Combat: How realistic?
We're nowhere near good enough with our AI for a computer simulant to best a human pilot in a dogfight unless the odds are further stacked against the human (computer flies a superior aircraft, computer has enhanced knowledge of &quot;reality&quot;, computer has advantage in numbers, computer ignores physical limitations of plane or pilot without consequence). Most computer pilot AIs in combat sims are some combination of the very simplistic &quot;locate your opponent, put your lift vector on him and pull up hard&quot; and the more complex &quot;human is doing this, so the best counter-move is this&quot;. There's also no small amount of &quot;I am a game, the purpose of my existence is to be enjoyable for the human, so while I must present a challenge, I must not require my human to attend a year of combat flight school before he stands a chance&quot;.
These are the basics of ACM taught to every fighter pilot, however these strategies will get you shot down against a competent human pilot every time, for two reasons:

&quot;Line up and pull up&quot; tends to settle you into a horizontal &quot;one-circle&quot; turning fight to conserve energy. In that fight, the first pilot to realize it's happening and pull vertical can tighten the turning radius by trading speed for altitude, getting inside and cutting across his opponent's turning circle for a good if somewhat high-offset firing chance. If the opponent sticks with &quot;line up and pull up&quot; he will do just the opposite, trading altitude for speed, increasing his turning radius and putting his tailpipe in front of his opponent's nose.

Moves and countermoves in air combat are a fluid dance that computers are plain bad at. Computers can beat humans in chess because the number of valid moves is fairly low, so the computer can calculate the most advantageous chain of several dozen moves quickly. However, computers are relatively bad at Go, because both the total game tree complexity and the available moves on each player-turn are massive.
Air combat is similar; while there are a few basic strategies, there are infinite possibilities, and because air combat, though &quot;turn-based&quot;, involves a different kind of &quot;turn&quot; from those in chess or Go, the computer doesn't get to sit there and think about its move for several seconds; it has to make the best move it can think of in a fraction of a second or else the human will get to make several &quot;moves&quot; before the computer reacts to the first one, and the way computers think, making it decide quickly usually boils down either to simplifying the decision-making or deciding in a random way.

Prioritization is still an area where computer AI is weak. Against one opponent, where your objective is to shoot that opponent down, a computer could do quite well. Facing the primary mission objective of completing a bombing run, with potentially hundreds of aircraft in the sky and thousands of military (and civilian) ground vehicles and people in a combat theater, making the decision of what object deserves your primary attention any given second is something even human pilots don't always do well. Most AIs in combat sims are fairly scripted; either the purpose of an enemy's existence is to shoot down the player, or it focuses on its mission until it cannot ignore the player. Real combat is somewhere in between, especially when your mission is something like CAS or BARCAP where your job isn't one fixed point on the ground or one plane in the air.


Now, computers have some advantages that are considered &quot;cheating&quot; in combat sims but would apply to an unmanned fighter against a manned one. First is the ability to sustain maneuvers in excess of a human's G-limit. As long as the airframe can handle it, the computer can pull 12g turns, or -12g, whatever. Second is that the weight of a human, plus the &quot;man-machine interface&quot; of the cockpit systems, is greater than the mass of a computer directly connected to the instrumentation. The computer is also much faster at working with the aircraft's systems than a human could ever be, so a computer pilot, within a couple seconds of seeing a &quot;blip&quot; on the radar, could have the target locked up, while a human, given the same blip at the same time, would still be slewing tracking gates in the B-scope.
A third big advantage is 720* visibility. Humans have about a 170* &quot;cone&quot; of visual response, and a fairly poor 5-10* window of actual focus and acuity. With an unmanned craft, we can install cameras covering virtually 360* around the aircraft in the horizontal and vertical, and have the computer monitor and track objects within the full field of vision, as well as in IR or other non-visible light spectrums, much more efficiently than a human could do the same with the same camera systems.
Therefore, the first fully unmanned combat aircraft is very unlikely to look or work like a manned one, because its designers will have done things that would be bad decisions in a manned craft, but will give the computer a maneuverability, speed or visibility advantage that could compensate for more simplistic decision-making of the AI.