Actually, a drone has the potential to be a superior aircraft simply because there is no worry about killing the pilot with G forces. I'd start with the X-29 idea.
That said, a piloted aircraft is less likely to fire on American citizens.
Unless a drone plane can “think” on its own, it will have to be flown virtually in real-time. An electrical engineer told me that this would be impossible to do at high speeds with encrypting and decrpyting of the signal, so the signal would have to be unprotected. Anyone know anything about this?