SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has recently criticized the Pentagon’s F-35 program, as well as the “idiots” still working on its development. Over the last two days, Musk expressed his dissatisfaction with the $2 trillion lifetime cost of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which was developed by Lockheed Martin, and pointed out that this issue might be addressed in his recommendations for reducing costs.
“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk stated on X on Monday. This comment came just days after a declassified Pentagon report highlighted several reliability and security concerns with the jet, as reported by Bloomberg.
“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,” Musk continued.
On Sunday, Musk posted a video of synchronized Chinese drones, along with a strong condemnation of those “idiots” who “are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” He emphasized the inefficiency of crewed fighter jets in modern warfare.
“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,” Musk wrote in another post that day. “And fighter jets will be shot down very quickly if the opposing force has sophisticated SAM [surface-to-air missile] or drones, as shown by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”
In response, the Pentagon defended the program, stating that the F-35 aircraft currently in service are performing exceptionally well in the missions they were designed for. “We have combat capable aircraft in operation today and they perform exceptionally well against the threat for which they were designed,” said a spokesperson. “Pilots continually emphasize that this is the fighter they want to take to war if called upon.”
The F-35 is expected to remain operational until 2088, with a lifetime cost of more than $2 trillion, according to a May report from the Government Accountability Office. Despite this, the military plans to reduce the aircraft’s flying hours, as mentioned in the report.
Musk, during Donald Trump’s campaign, had pledged that he could save at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.
In a guest column for The Wall Street Journal last week, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy criticized various areas of inefficiency within the federal government, including the Pentagon. “The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent,” they wrote.
{Matzav.com}