On the other hand, landing probably is an easier task than driving given the small amount of ways it can go right versus wrong.
How much of the hardware is devoted to keeping the pilot alive? Once you remove that, the hardware might be a whole lot simpler and cheaper.
Unmanned, with autonomous carrier take offs, landings, and aerial refueling.
There's always going to be a need for humans in the loop. In any sort of major wartime scenario countries will be shooting, disabling, and jamming any form of comms and guidance they know about.
It would; you just need to filter out the sun. Apparently this is already a thing: http://www.trexenterprises.com/Pages/Products%20and%20Servic....
Since at least one of the fancy planes is pretty much guaranteed to stay connected to its flight, you can—if you have the room—stick your CIC in there, rather than on the ground. Then, rather than remote-controlling your fighters from the ground, you can remote-control your fighters from another fighter. Which means that now you only need one crew to pilot, say, 8 aircraft. (Well, for now, doctrine would still require humans in the cockpits of the subordinate aircraft; you just don't need to train them nearly as much on how to execute precise group maneuvers. Like driverless cars on highways!)
This is oddly easier in the air (because aerial maneuvers are something fighters need to do as a unit); the hard part is takeoff and landing, because there's not enough hands in an aerial CIC to pilot all the planes up and down. So you want these hypothetical subordinate drone fighters to be able to be passed off automatically between aerial CIC and ground control. (It's convenient if they mostly launch and park themselves, because you then need less ground-control staff on your aircraft carrier or whatever, but it's important that they can be passed off to humans on the ground when necessary.)
Having options and fallbacks are good. I can't imagine the Navy not looking at all their data in 5 years and figuring out a reasonable plan.
We're all just armchairing it. Engineering data is really all that matters at the end of the day.
So mostly the number bandied around might be just development and for total cost, upkeep costs, divided by the number of airframes. So losing one isn't so hard, if it's unmanned.