Billionaire Elon Musk, chosen by US President-elect Donald Trump to slash federal government spending, on Monday criticized modern fighter planes, saying drones were the future of aerial warfare.
“Manned combat aircraft are obsolete anyway in the age of drones. Pilots will be killed,” the head of SpaceX, Tesla and X said in a post on his social media platforms.
Musk singled out for criticism the F-35 next-generation fighter jet built by US-based Lockheed Martin, which entered service in 2015.
“Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter planes like the F-35,” he posted alongside a video of hundreds of drones hovering in the sky.
The world’s most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-35, is capable of hiding and can also be used to gather intelligence.
Germany, Poland, Finland and Romania have recently signed deals for the aircraft.
However, its development has faced problems, particularly in the design of its computer programs, and its very high operating costs are regularly criticized by its opponents.
“The design of the F-35 was broken at the level of requirements, because it required too many things for too many people,” Musk said Monday, calling it “an expensive (and) complex jack of all trades, in some Didn’t even say master.” ,
For Mauro Gilly, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, “What makes the F-35 expensive … is the software and electronics, not the pilots.”
This is important “because a reusable drone would need to get all the fancy electronics of the F-35,” he said at the conference.
He also noted that the existence of the F-35 has forced US rivals to develop their own aircraft and advanced radars to match it.
“By simply existing, the F-35 and B-1 force Russia and China to make strategic choices they would not otherwise have to make (i.e. budget allocation),” Gilly said, referring to the B-1 heavy bomber. “
“Even if Musk were right (and he is not), removing the programs would reduce these constraints on him.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
