- As Tesla Head Slams ‘F-35’ Fighter Jet
By Kolawole Ojebisi
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has berated the United States of America for using fighter jets in this time and age stressing that the government should do away with the fighter jets and procure drones.
Musk, who was tapped by US President-elect, Donald Trump, to slash Federal Government spending, noted that fighter jets make pilots susceptible to death during warfare.
The billionaire Head of Tesla and microblogging application, X, stressed that the drones are 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, in a post on his social media platform on Monday.
Musk singled out the F-35 — a next-generation fighter jet manufactured by US-based Lockheed Martin that entered service in 2015 — for criticism.
“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 programs, and its very high operating costs are regularly criticized 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.
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.”
