Dale Brown has written many books that feature unmanned fighters or bombers. In his tales he gets around the initial deployment and air supriority missions by the use of manned motherships and latterly by satellite link or space station.
If we imagine recent operations and place a UAV into the situation we can see that it wold not be simple. The initial GW1 deployment was of AD Interceptors to contain the Iraqi Air Force in Kuwait. The manned aircraft could go on state as it arrives and with tanker support could even maintain a DCA mission while the ground support deploys. For a UAV it would need pre-deployed support or, as Dale Brown uses, a mothership.
Certainly, money-no-object, we could make a good fist of it now. (By WE I mean industry - US in particular).