Elon Musk: Trump ally Musk calls for US to replace fighter jets with drones

Billionaire Elon Musk, tapped by US President-elect Donald Trump to slash federal authorities spending, lashed out at trendy fighter jets on Monday, saying that drones had been the way forward for air fight.

“Manned fighter jets are out of date within the age of drones anyway. Will simply get pilots killed,” stated the pinnacle of SpaceX, Tesla and X, in a publish 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.

“In the meantime, some idiots are nonetheless constructing manned fighter jets just like the F-35,” he posted, alongside a video of lots of of drones hovering in formation within the sky.

The F-35, the world’s most superior fighter, is stealth-capable and will also be used to collect intelligence.

Germany, Poland, Finland and Romania have all lately signed offers for the plane.

Its improvement, nonetheless, has suffered from points, notably within the design of its pc packages, and its very excessive working prices are commonly criticized by its detractors. “The F-35 design was damaged on the necessities stage as a result of it was required to be too many issues to too many individuals,” stated Musk on Monday, calling it “an costly (and) complicated jack of all trades, grasp of none.”

For Mauro Gilli, a researcher on the Swiss Federal Institute of Know-how in Zurich, “what makes the F-35… costly is the software program and the electronics, not the pilot per se.”

That is vital “as a result of a reusable drone would wish to get all that flashy electronics of an F-35,” he stated on X.

He additionally identified that the existence of the F-35 had compelled US rivals to develop their very own plane and superior radar to match it.

“By merely present, the F-35 and the B-1 drive Russia and China into strategic decisions they’d not should make in any other case (i.e. funds allocations),” Gilli stated, referring to B-1 heavy bomber plane.

“Even when Musk had been proper (and he’s not), deleting the packages would chill out these constraints on them.”