I think developments like this:
Cassidian
...will hasten the end of the big, expensive, manned fighter jet.
Drones and improvements in guiding systems for cruise missiles will make it easier to "cut the middle man" and deliver bombs to targets without strapping them to a manned jet first.
Being German, I was pissed about the Eurofighter Typhoon debacle and that we actually spend that much money on an already outdated aircraft without an AESA radar and with only minor stealth characteristics, but recently I realized that this might actually turn out to be a unexpected blessing in disguise.
It might cause the German Airforce to skip what is usually called the "5th generation" of fighter aircraft (X) and switch to unmanned systems sooner, much like many developing countries skipped the age of telephone land lines and introduced mobile telephone networks without bothering to invest into a land line network first.
If we would buy something like the F-35 in addition to the Typhoon now, like Great Britain does, it would be all the harder to convince politicians and the people of spending money on new drones/UAVs soon after.
(X) (I never got why people say the Typhoon is not a 5th generation fighter, no matter how critical I am of it. It was developed and build at the same time as the F-22, F-35 and the latest Russian machines, it has all the newest pilot-machine-interface gimmicks like voice control, helmet controlled weapon lock-on or three dimensional acoustic warning systems aso., most importantly it has super cruise engines, also a vector control system for the engine muzzle exists albeit it hasn't been ordered by the customers and when it comes to usage of new composite materials it is even more advanced than the F-22 and F-35.
The only substantial piece of modern technology it really lacks is an AESA radar, which is what makes me angry, so this is no "the Typhoon is better than X"-rant. But is that and the mere fact that it doesn't look as "science fiction-y" as the other designs enough to say it isn't a 5th generation aircraft? Does that make it somehow part of the previous generation that was developed 30 years prior?
Even a retarded kid is still part of its generation, isn't it?
I think using the word generation to distinguish machines that look stealthy enough from those that don't is simply a poor choice of words, especially when modern radar technology is quickly leveling the playing field between stealth and no stealth.
Considering the small stealth characteristic the Typhoon has comes from A: it being designed to have the smallest possible frontal silhouette and B: its composite material parts simply letting radar radiation pass through it, it might even be harder to detect by passive radar than those full blown stealth jets that rely on deflecting and absorbing radar radiation are.)
