Okay, let's weigh up the choices.
1) You haul an 80kg individual, tens of thousands of litres of atmosphere and enough oxygen filters to recycle it, a pressurized hull capable of storing that atmosphere safely, enough food and water to sustain a human for the entire duration of their time in space, the waste management infrastructure to process their disgusting bodily products, exercise equipment to prevent their muscles from atrophying, entertainment to stop them going completely insane, radiators and coolers to keep them at a non-fatal temperature, medical supplies in case they get sick, backups and replacements for all the above systems and all the additional fuel and thruster required to carry all of the above and make it change velocity at the rate required to be effective in combat.. so that they can press a button (provided they aren't asleep, or taking a piss, or not within a few seconds of the button they need to press, in which case they are dead).
2) You build a basic IFF (using technology which has been around since the second world war) and just activate the AI as soon as war is declared.
Because, again, all a human in that situation is going to be able to do is rely on instruments. You'd need to build the IFF anyway, and the human pilot would merely be pressing the button if the IFF failed to respond, only slower because pathetic human reaction times. The human does not have time to phone home and check whether the thing which may already be firing at them from its invisible position beyond the veil of light-seconds is friendly or not, because that would take a few minutes too. Indeed, automated spacecraft, if programmed to do so, would be vastly more capable of making cautious decisions in this regard because they don't have to worry about dying. A human would always have an enormous motivation to simply mash the button at the slightest provocation because delaying a few seconds could kill them.
Again, an organic crew is a heavy, expensive, incredibly demanding component which makes people sad when it gets broken, has to be persuaded to spend months or years of its life trapped in a tiny metal box waiting to get obliterated by hypervelocity missile-bullets and ultimately contributes nothing except to shackle the computers which actually do the fighting to its pathetic reaction times. But since people will keep trying to find reasons why manned warships are a good idea.. let me put it this way. I'm not saying it's unthinkable noone would ever try them, whether for ethical reasons or because the military staff were raised on too much science fiction, but the simple fact is that they will lose. They will lose almost every single time they are put up against fully automated spaceships, whether economically due to the much higher costs or militarily due to slower reaction times, and whatever ethical questions you might think exist here, people will generally be far more open minded when they are losing wars and watching their people get blown to shit in the depths of space because they can't compete with machines. So realistically, there is no reason why anyone would keep using manned spacecraft past an initial experimental phase.
But that's realism. We can separate realism from fiction, and indeed I'm saying we should because it's more fun. It's more fun to pretend that space battles would be like dramatic naval battles or thrilling WW2 dogfights rather than a bunch of angry computerized wasps lobbing swarms of missiles and lasers in each other's general direction at ranges too far for a human to comprehend. There is no issue with imagination in fiction.. until you start claiming its realistic.
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