I'm not recommending that they do it one way or another - there're a lot of new possibilities that should be explored, which means that more of the same might not be the way to go. All I was saying that it's silly to say categorically that "drones are slow", because they certainly don't have to be - if anything, they have the potential to be even faster and more maneuverable than manned fighter jets, because you can get rid of a lot of the cruft and restrictions related to keeping a pilot alive and letting them pilot effectively. No more canopy, no more cockpit shielding, no more visible instrumentation and layout requirements, no more ejection seat, no more oxygen supply, no more human survivable g-limits, etc.

I'm also not advocating for a completely autonomous drone, just saying that automatically flying a plane to evade a missile doesn't seem terribly difficult, as far as AI problems go, and the amounts of money thrown at these sorts of things are absurdly large.

Heh probably at least a little. I've got a decent grounding in AI and some in computer vision, and those portions at least seem doable, I've worked on some basic guidance algorithms before, and I know people who are having some success making generalized autopilot systems for drones for spatial waypoint following and flight controls, so that portion seems achievable as well. Once you can reach that level of abstraction, it starts looking like something a minimax algo with sufficient look-ahead depth could deal with, at least with a very rough level of precision. But yeah, devil and details.