If the US were at war with China or Russia, they could certainly shoot our satellites from the sky or locally jam communications with their own drones. You can't remote control a vehicle your signal can't reach.
That seems a naive sentiment to me. You say "go fully autonomous" as if that's a capability that exists when it doesn't.
I don't believe that an autonomous computer program today is capable of deciding when to shoot missiles at people, when to shoot down another aircraft, or when to drop bombs on a building. I don't think a program, with no human input, no GPS, at night, in inclement weather, in the face of enemy sensor jamming, is even able to decide if it's reached its target accurately enough to then attack that target. I also don't think any computer program, even operating only in a simulation, can perfectly evaluate the acceptable level of collateral damage to civilians and infrastructure from its decisions -- to decide, for example, whether it should complete its mission of bombing an enemy unit if that unit enters a home or a hospital. I also don't think either of us is more informed and smarter than the US military and US congress, both of which have decided that there is still a future for manned aircraft for all these reasons.
I don't believe you really think otherwise either. "At this point", we don't even have autonomous cars that work in the real world. With all the best minds in AI working on the problem, with a working GPS and a paved road, our "Google cars" are still foiled by such simple things as a foggy morning blinding the LIDAR. It's going to be a long time before you replace the human pilot in an F15 or a B2.
