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Elon Musk Calls F-35 Builders ‘Idiots’, Favors Drone Swarms [1]

['David Hambling', 'Kevin Payne', 'Cassidy Horton', 'Senior Contributor']

Date: 2024-11-26

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter, a 5th generation combat jet aircraft, is the most ... [+] important US fighter program SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Elon Musk is slated to head up the Department of Government Efficiency and slash federal spending, with a salvo of messages on Musk’s own Twitter/X platform giving some idea what he has in his sights. He wants to make $2 trillion in savings and his signaling looks potentially alarming for defense contractors….at least some of them.

In particular, Musk seems to have a beef with the F-35, America’s most important combat aircraft…and with a few tweets, he brought down the share price of the makers Lockheed Martin by more than 3%.





DOGE Versus Stealth

In a post on Sunday, Musk commented on a video showing a formation of hundreds of small drones saying that "Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35."

Musk elaborated on what he sees as the F-35’s flaws in a follow up post, stating:

“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people. This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none. Success was never in the set of possible outcomes. And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.”

As Musk went on to explain, it is not just the F-35 he sees as outdated but all aircraft with pilots on board:

“Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs. A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot.

And fighter jets will be shot down very quickly if the opposing force has sophisticated SAM or drones, as shown by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Fighter jets do have the advantage of helping Air Force officers get laid. Drones are much less effective in this regard”

Twitter is not an ideal platform for nuanced discussion and there was little informed comment in what followed. The Pro-F-35 and Pro-Musk factions both seem so deeply entrenched they cannot see over the parapet to observe each other’s position.

Musk’s anti-F-35 rhetoric reached a high point with this cry: “Some US weapons systems are good, albeit overpriced, but please, in the name of all that is holy, let us stop the worst military value for money in history that is the F-35 program!”

There was much unhelpful and often uninformed discussion of exactly what the F-35 and drones could do. What is the real issue here?

Technical Issues

Impressive displays at airshows do nothing to silence F-35 critics Getty Images

To describe the F-35’s development as troubled would be a massive understatement. The aircraft has undergone a seemingly endless series of delays, cost overruns and technical glitches. The program is estimated to be a decade behind schedule and $180bn over budget and still struggles with “reliability, maintainability and availability” according to the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation’s annual report.

But the program has rumbled on. Critics say this is simply because the investment and lack of alternatives make it “too big to fail,” but more than a thousand of the jets have been delivered and the F-35 has been used successfully in combat. Training exercises and simulations suggest that the F-35 is highly capable , with one report stating that in realistic testing scenarios it killed enemy aircraft at a ratio of 20 to 1 (“How the F-35 Can Singlehandedly Destroy an Air Force”).

Needless to say the argument about whether the F-35 is overpriced and overrated or unfairly criticized is as loud as ever, as you might expect for a program expected to top a trillion dollars. Musk did not engage in much discussion of why he sees the F-35 as flawed, but did comment on the limitations of the stealth design which makes it hard to see on radar, stating in another tweet that “It is laughably easy to take down fighter jets. ‘Stealth’ means nothing if you use elementary AI with low light sensitivity cameras. They aren’t invisible.”

Some questioned this sweeping statement, and a follow up suggested that Musk was really talking about thermal imaging cameras – “Infra-red search and track” in fighter-speak – with added AI.

The benefits of limitations of stealth technology are a huge and active field of discussion. It would be wrong to state either that stealth is dead or that it is essential. It might at least be worth noting that Russian stealth aircraft have not featured in the current conflict and their stealth attack drone failed catastrophically. How well or badly the F-35 would fare in a similar war is another matter.

But whether Musk is right or wrong may be beside the point. He is being put in charge of cutting government overspending and he appears to have identified a program he thinks should be cut. It is more a question of whether he has the power and influence to make that happen.

Winners And Losers: Enter The Swarm

As a recent piece in Mother Jones noted, about half of the discretionary budget, the spending that Congress approves each year, goes on defense, with more than $840 billion handed to the Pentagon in the 2024 budget. A large proportion of this goes to the Big Five contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX (Raytheon), General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman – exactly the sort of traditional industry players that Musk loves to disrupt.

Ukraine produces large numbers of highly effective drones which have decimated Russian armor, ... [+] artillery and infantry Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

Hence the F-35 program, old 90's technology to Musk, is an obvious target for cuts. But there is another aspect.

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump stated in in a video on his campaign website, so even if there are cuts to big programs like the F-35, overall spending may increase. That would mean major investments in new programs, presumably ones with the sort of high-tech pizzazz favored by the DOGE.

As the original Tweet indicated, Musk is a big fan of drones and lots of them, having previously Tweeted that “Drone swarm battles are coming that will boggle the mind.”

At the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London Musk said that “any future wars between advanced countries, or at least countries with drone capability, will be very much the drone wars.”

This seems like good news for companies like Anduril and Shield AI and Palantir which are involved in supplying AI-powered systems to the Pentagon, and already have AI-enabled small drones and even drone swarms ready to go. Unlike existing drones, swarms can operate as large co-operative groups with minimal human oversight. These companies are Musk’s spiritual kin, Silicon Valley startups rather than traditional industrial players, seeking to bring new tech to the military sector. And they may find that the wind is shifting their way.

To what extent large numbers of small, low-cost drones can augment, replace or supersede traditional airpower remains an open question. And whether they will still be as affordable when made by American contractors is equally important. But the evidence from Ukraine suggests drones will play an increasingly dominate role in future wars. (To declare an interest, as author of a book on how small drones will conquer the world I do have a certain bias here).

While Ukraine and Russia are acquiring more than a million drones a year each, the U.S. is still buying them by the thousand. If Musk has his way, the future U,.S. force will likely have fewer F-35s and a lot more small drones. The one thing that is certain is that the debate will continue: with this amount of billions at stake, not to mention national security, nobody is going to go quietly.

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[1] Url: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/26/elon-musk-calls-f-35-builders-idiots-favors-drone-swarms/

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