I keep going back to "How could they tell the difference?""U.S. Air Force is using civilians to fly drones..."
(I kid, I kid.)
Besides, the USAF is missing a golden opportunity by not developing a game called Drone Pilot, and secretly using it as a live controller for that very thing, a la Robert Preston in The Last Starfighter. Plus they'd get the money from game sales and commercials for strike videos posted to YouTube, which might someday pay for the F-35 Thunderjug. Then again, it would be kinder and quicker to simply declare in-house that the entire F-35 program is a threat to national security, and quietly start knocking off Lockheed execs and senior project officers, and blowing up the bare few flying examples, until it simply ceases to exist. Which is ten kinds of 1950's-elegant.
But worse than that, between two Dumbocrat regimes intent on screwing the entire military more, harder, faster, interspersed with an eight year stretch of "Do everything with even less! Fuck yeah!", I can't see why anyone there stays, unless you're hanging at 18-years-in-and-almost-out, or just plain 18-and-believe-your-recruiter-as-if-he-lactates-single-malt.
I couldn't seriously counsel anyone to embark upon the career until the entire current generation of general officers die off, and probably not until this entire generation is out of the business. Whatever thin, hard cadre there is tending the eternal flame, it's got to be getting to be a pretty damned small core.