Memphis, you're missing the point on a number of levels. Nothing I said indicates I believe airliners should be unmanned or I don't think unmanned ISR platforms should be bigger or faster than manned ones. That's just nuts.
My point has been that we should recruit and train operators with a view to the kinds of systems they'll be operating. If you're going to be operating a manned aircraft, you need to actually be trained up as a pilot. If you're going to drop ordnance from a manned aircraft, you need experience in doing that.
But if you're going to be "flying" a UAV, you don't need to have experience as pilot of a manned aircraft. That's right -- I firmly believe that, and so do a lot of other knowledgable people. And if you're going to drop ordnance from that UAV, you need to have training and experience in dropping ordnance from a UAV -- not a manned aircraft! Yes, you do need to know how to discriminate targets on a CRT. Yes, you do need to know the best way to drop a specific piece of ordnance, based on info you receive in the UAV control console -- not in a manned aircraft. In fact, I could argue that having manned experience is so dissimilar from one's experience as a UAV operator that the manned experience could be a distraction.
Again, I realize this is not exactly what the military pilot community wants to hear -- but it's a logic-based approach to manning UAVs, an approach I'm convinced is coming down the pike now, and rapidly.