On the UCAV's my impression is that situational awareness is greater from a manned cockpit. Replacing this with an adequate remote sensor system would require several crewmembers per craft monitoring various aspects of a full spectrum sensor suite on various facings and ranges. A team of experts operating each craft and then there is a coordination issue.
It could be a cost/complexity factor considering the relative simplicity of getting much the same effect using conventional manned fighter development.
A definite pro however is the physical limitations of a pilot in high stress manoeuvres, aside from his safety from the combat environment (on this however what is likely is that UCAV's will be controlled from AWACS-like buses near the battlefield at the very least due to the potential of jamming technologies and thus vulnerable to interception by dedicated, penetration counter-air interceptors like the Flanker/Su-30 datalink package).
My guess is that high risk, short range combat environments like the close support and interceptor roles may become the purview of UCAV's but deep penetrations and air superiority will still require the mission adaptability of a manned cockpit, thereby having the command/control centre of the vehicle right there on the battlefield, in fact in the vehicle. This simply makes more sense to me personally.
On the SuperHornet replacement...I'm more than a little skeptical. This isn't the Cold War anymore where cultivated paranoia funded open ended FX/LFX projects and Blackbird and whatever. These thousands of billions of US dollars simply can't be justified against phantom enemies which really never existed in the first place. Ultimately the F-15 for all its expense hasn't been responsible for anything bar a series of technological marques, more materiel weight has been lended by the F-16 and F/A-18, whilst the old Phantom could've easily taken up the slack as an interim for those two types and the US air defence machine would've held wonderful parity, if not superiority with any or all other air forces in the world from then to now.
The FX as it was, wholly unrealistic (hence ridiculously expensive and rather loosely defined) design requirements, was a knee jerk response to paranoia where simple diplomacy could've won the day.
The F-22 and even to some extent the F-35 are effectively the last whimpers of the Cold War era, which in any case never truly ceased just because Roger Waters had a concert in Berlin. Activity in the Middle East and central Asia (most particularly) and US interests in the Black Sea region are a testament to this, international journalists in the Ukraine and transCaucasus region publish a firm local sentiment that the Cold War continues at the very least in the minds of district commanders and the Kremlin (it's mostly over the oil and conventional, not nuclear industries now).
The thing is we're supposed to be older and wiser, nobody can afford another arms race.
Like the Eagle the F-22 is a ridiculously expensive, highly complicated warplane which simply has no direct contemporary planned for service entry (only a limited number of SuperFlankers have been built for India).
It has no adversary to justify the expense, a final F-15 variant proposal (purely for reasons of introducing new airframe lives to the fleet), can handle things just fine with parity in any conceivable engagements of the foreseeable future. Just saved yourself a few thousand million dollars right there with a bigger force projection to boot.
The F-35 has better arguments on two fronts, it represents a downsizing of production and infrastructure required for the given force projection, provides a necessary update of the short field and high turnaround units most particularly with the Marines, effectively filling the gap between attack helicopters and modern warplanes, as well as gives new airframe lives to the existing workhorse fleets assigned forward defences and carrier battlegroups.
It's like the modern Phantom, a great all rounder in basic design.
The second front is spending recuperation, a tremendous amount (literally thousands of millions of dollars) was spent developing the high survivability airframe technologies begun with the HaveBlue project, ultimately the F-35 represents its step into general service use.
The SuperHornet is perfectly adequate for the forseeable future, representing a Tomcat replacement for the fleet with contemporary updating. Performance and technology is wonderfully modern and contemporary, it is the US Flanker at this time with very similar all round performance. In terms of facing potential enemies, there is simply no reason to even contemplate replacing it.
It has some high survivability features, the Flankers when used properly have datalinked cross-field signal interpretation and command/control. They even out. Performance armed is about the same as the latest SM-Flanker update. US airframe finishing and avionics tech is nicer, Russian stuff more robust. In a war the SuperHornet will probably have the edge most of the time. What more could you want?
