[svandamme]

I would think the learning is key, because well those things would be come useless in a real war against a serious adversary if they couldn't be taught to fly on their own and do their mission?

knock out or jam satelites/comms and suddenly the UAV would be a sitting duck, right?

The ability for computers to gather data these days, Big data and then learn of that is just downright scary.. most people haven't got a clue what is possible these days if only you gather enough data first.

DCS world for instance, it's a military flight sim.. for civvies to play with.
And it's from Russian Developer.
I've often wondered how much of it is used to learn AI piloting , tactics and missile flight tactics tech

They already have competitions and what not, and I think there was a US team flying AI within DCS world against humans to test it.. and it was pretty good