Russia Could Deploy Unmanned Bomber After 2040 - Air Force

I'm not a big fan of the new "next gen" bomber the Air Force wants to build. Supposedly it's going to have a manned and unmanned feature to it. The problem is that a drone will never have the instincts that a pilot has, at least not yet. And, if one was somehow shot down or, as in Iran, landed pretty much intact, there goes decades of research and development into one of the most technologically advanced aircraft ever built. There's a reason we haven't flown F-22's into current theaters yet...

That being said, I believe that the US already has tested prototypes for this kind of weapon system. They sent out the request, what, last year? That usually means that companies like boeing, LM, etc., have been cooking up something in their "skunkworks" divisions for years to show the military. If we've been actually flying even scale mockups of these UAV's, then we can be pretty sure that Russia isn't that far behind. 2040? That's a little far out there...