Elon Musk attacked modern fighter jets on Monday. The American billionaire, appointed by Donald Trump to head a commission to cut spending by the American federal government, affirmed that drones represented the future of conflicts in the air.
“Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the drone era. With the only result being the death of the pilots”declared the boss of SpaceX and Tesla on his X platform.
Elon Musk specifically attacked the F-35, a combat aircraft from American manufacturer Lockheed Martin and considered the flagship of the United States air force since its entry into service in 2015.
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“Meanwhile, you have idiots still building manned fighter jets like the F-35”he reacted on Sunday by publishing a video where hundreds of drones stand in formation a few dozen meters high.
A so-called fifth-generation stealth aircraft, the F-35 has recently been the subject of export contracts to Romania, Poland and Germany. Its development suffered from its complexity, particularly for the design of computer programs, and its very high operating costs are regularly criticized by its detractors.
“The F-35 design fell short on requirements because it was asked to be too many things to too many people”declared this Monday Elon Musk, for whom the F-35 has become a machine “complex and expensive” without any combat specialty.
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But for Mauro Gilli, researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, “what makes the F-35 (…) expensive, it's the software and electronic components, not the driver itself”. “This is important because a reusable drone would need all the flashy electronics of the F-35”said the researcher on
He further emphasizes that the existence of a program with technologies as advanced as the F-35 forces the United States' rivals to launch programs to respond to it, in particular advanced radars.
“By their mere existence, the F-35 and B-1 force Russia and China to make strategic choices they would not otherwise have to make (i.e. allocate budgetary resources)”selon Mauro Gilli. “Even if Musk were right (and he is wrong), removing these programs would relax the constraints” on these rivals of the United States.
(With AFP)
