[jason taylor]

"Your determination to avoid making any concrete statement about the premise you're arguing from is quite impressive."

As the premise is space combat which has not taken place yet, making concrete statements is difficult. And any statement about a possible future war is necessarily speculative. Could you perhaps tell me what details you wish given? The premise is that a force of indeterminate size is sent on an indeterminate mission and wishes to gain intelligence, deny it to it's enemy, extend dominance over no-man's-space and whatever before beginning operations. The question is "what is the fighter to ship ratio" and given the potential of drones that can only be answered in the light of answering how many manned vs unmanned assets are needed to do that job.

"No, it has some rather distinct implications about fitness to engage other fighters in combat."

Which implication is irrelevant for planes which spend most of the time in ground attack and is in any case ahistorical and would be like demanding that the Grenadier Guards be the only regiment in the British Army that uses grenades. The only implication is that fighters were cool when Snoopy fought the Red Baron.

"If you want to define every bomber, ground attack aircraft, AWACS, military transport, gunship and so forth in the world as an 'oddity' you have perhaps gone a great deal too far."

Dedicated bombers and ground attack aircraft are seldom built, transports are not intended for combat, AWACS is a command aircraft, and gunships are not planes. So yes the word fighter becomes obsolete when nearly all warplanes are fighters in designation and fighter-bombers in function.