Navy looking at fighter capability for X-47B

USNI:

Could the U.S. Navy’s future Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft have an air-to-air role? The service’s director of air warfare Rear Adm. Mike Manazir posed that it could during a Dec. 20 interview with USNI News.

Manazir contemplated the possibility that that the UCLASS, which is primarily being designed for the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike roles, could be used as a flying missile magazine which could supplement the firepower of the F/A-18E/F and F-35C Joint Strike Fighter in air-to-air combat as a robotic wingman of sorts.

“Maybe we put a whole bunch of AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile) on it and that thing is the truck,” Manazir said. “So this unmanned truck goes downtown with—as far as it can go—with a decision-maker.”

In Manazir’s vision the UCLASS could be commanded remotely from a Northrop Grumman E-2D Hawkeye or a Lockheed Martin F-35C Joint Strike Fighter flight leader.

The concept has a lot of merit, said Air Force Reserve Col. Michael Pietrucha, a former F-15E weapons systems officer and autonomous unmanned air vehicle expert in a Wednesday interview with USNI News.

“This is not beyond the state-of-the-art,” Pietrucha said.
“The difficulty is always that the aircraft it self has no judgment and no prioritization scheme and isn’t going to have the systems onboard to do all things that a fighter does.”

The solution, Pietrucha said, is to leverage the sensors, situational awareness and inherent human judgment of a fighter pilot in a manned command aircraft. The manned aircraft would detect, track and identify the target, then hand-off the target for the unmanned aircraft to engage the “bandit”—as hostile targets are known.

“The Navy is ahead of the Air Force on this,” Pietrucha said, specifically citing the Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) concept where a common air picture would be shared across multiple air platforms via a network of data-links.
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But using an unmanned aircraft such as the UCLASS in an air-to-air role will have some disadvantages too. Air superiority fighters, particularly the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and Boeing F-15C Eagle, use a combination of high altitudes and high supersonic speeds to impart the maximum possible launch energy to the AMRAAM to engage targets at extended ranges.

The UCLASS, however, is expected to be subsonic aircraft. As such, it will not be able to impart as much launch energy to the AMRAAM as a Boeing F/A-18 Hornet would—which itself flies at lower speeds and altitudes compared to a genuine air superiority platform like the Eagle.
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I don't think developing a supersonic version of the X-47B type unmanned aircraft is out of the question.  In fact I think it is a natural progression and would have some merit.  The manned aircraft are already relying on sensors to make them aware of enemy aircraft.  Programming them to engage or to engage upon command should not be that big a stretch.