Elon Musk calls for US to replace fighter jets with drones

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South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk tapped by US President-elect Donald Trump to slash federal government spending, lashed out at modern fighter jets on Monday, saying that drones were the future of air combat.

“Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed,” said the head of SpaceX, Tesla and X, in a post on his social media platform.

Musk singled out the F-35 – a next-generation fighter jet manufactured by US-based Lockheed Martin that entered service in 2015 – for criticism.

World’s most advanced fighter

“Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,” he posted, alongside a video of hundreds of drones hovering in formation in the sky.

The F-35, the world’s most advanced fighter, is stealth capable and can also be used to gather intelligence.

Germany, Poland, Finland and Romania have all recently signed deals for the aircraft.

Its development, however, has suffered from issues, notably in the design of its computer programmes, and its very high operating costs are regularly criticised by its detractors.

“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” said Musk on Monday, calling it “an expensive (and) complex jack of all trades, master of none.”

For Mauro Gilli, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, “what makes the F-35… expensive is the software and the electronics, not the pilot per se.”

This is significant “because a reusable drone would need to get all that flashy electronics of an F-35,” he said on X.

Advanced radar

He also pointed out that the existence of the F-35 had forced US rivals to develop their own aircraft and advanced radar to match it.

“By simply existing, the F-35 and the B-1 force Russia and China into strategic choices they would not have to make otherwise (i.e. budget allocations),” Gilli said, referring to B-1 heavy bomber aircraft.

“Even if Musk were right (and he is not), deleting the programs would relax these constraints on them.”