I remember the army's programme chief telling me some years ago that attrition losses were factored into the 54-aircraft buy, but they are going through airframes at a rate of knots.
Genuine question - why do UAVs need to be flown and potentially lost in peacetime? Why can all the training not be done synthetically? For the pilot, he is not in the aircraft anyway so will lose nothing in terms of realism from sitting in a simulator . Any ground forces he is supposed to be interacting can do so synthetically also, no?