Can someone more knowledgeable than me in this matter explain why fighter jets still require human pilots? Why aren't they completely replaced by drones?
2. A pilot isn't just a sack of meat that uses monkey-instincts to steer the plane forward, they are a cog in a very large machine both making decisions and following and interpreting orders as the situation changes around them.
Drone jets have existed for decades, they're called cruise missiles.
DCS's missile simulation models are so far from the real thing that DCS is what simulation engineers refer to as "negative training". That is, if you train to fight using DCS, you're training to fight within DCS, not training in a way that's going to carry over to the real world. DCS is fine for what it is -- a simulation that reflects as much of the pilot/vehicle interface of various aircraft as is possible. But when it comes to sensors and weapons, it's very far from reality.
The Alpha Dogfight trials were a PR stunt but they were also a part of a larger program to see how AI technology can assist human pilots. Alpha Dogfight is akin to things like Deep Blue/Alpha Go in that it has opened up a whole domain to further research and deployment of AI systems to assist humans.
If anyone else is wondering, they used a 3000 foot cone with point at the nose of the simulated aircraft, any time the enemy got within 3000 feet and 1 degree of the boresight of the plane, a certain number of hits per simulated frame were counted as hitting. Get X number of hits, that's a kill. For the livestreams they wonderfully represented this as a health bar.
On the subject of electronic warfare - I assume it's still very classified but given that the current teen series aircraft apparently have some serious EW magic in them (I don't have any citations for exactly what they can do other than I read some comments by IIRC an Australian ground radar operator and apparently they were completely outgunned - i.e. fake formations rather than mere jamming) I think we will be reading about exactly they can do at great length on the hackernews's of the future.
Not very much, the datalink is sort of peer-to-peer - the F-35 is one of the first aircarft to have a satellite datalink.