Elon Musk attacks “obsolete” fighter jets and calls for replacing them with drones

Billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Donald Trump to head a commission to slash spending by the American federal government, attacked modern combat planes on Monday, saying that drones represented the future of conflicts in the air.

“Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the drone era. With the only result being the death of the pilots,” declared the boss of SpaceX and Tesla on his X platform.

Elon Musk specifically attacked the F-35, a combat aircraft from American manufacturer Lockheed Martin and considered the flagship of the United States air force since its entry into service in 2015.

Very high operating costs

A so-called fifth-generation stealth aircraft, the F-35 has recently been the subject of export contracts to Romania, Poland, and even Germany. Its development suffered from its complexity, particularly for the design of computer programs, and its very high operating costs are regularly criticized by its detractors.

“The design of the F-35 failed in terms of prerequisites, because it was asked to be too many things for too many people,” Elon Musk said on Monday, for whom the F-35 has become a “complex” machine. and expensive” without any combat specialty.

But for Mauro Gilli, researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, “what makes the F-35 (…) expensive is the software and electronic components, not the pilot itself”. “This is important because a reusable drone would need all the flashy electronics of the F-35,” the X researcher said.

He further emphasizes that the existence of a program with technologies as advanced as the F-35 forces the United States’ rivals to launch programs to respond to it, notably advanced radars.

“By their mere existence, the F-35 and B-1 force Russia and China to make strategic choices they would not otherwise have to make (i.e. allocate budgetary resources)” , according to Mauro Gilli.

“Even if Musk were right (and he is wrong), eliminating these programs would ease the constraints” on these rivals of the United States, he added.