WASHINGTON: Elon Musk is slated to head up the Department of Government Efficiency and slash federal spending, with a salvo of messages on Musk’s own Twitter/X platform giving some idea what he has in his sights.
Forbes reports he wants to make $2 trillion in savings and his signaling looks potentially alarming for defense contractors….at least some of them.
In particular, Musk seems to have a beef with the F-35, America’s most important combat aircraft…and with a few tweets, he brought down the share price of the makers Lockheed Martin by more than 3%.
DOGE Versus Stealth
In a post on Sunday, Musk commented on a video showing a formation of hundreds of small drones saying that “Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”
Musk elaborated on what he sees as the F-35’s flaws in a follow up post, stating: “The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people. 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.”
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As Musk went on to explain, it is not just the F-35 he sees as outdated but all aircraft with pilots on board: “Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs.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.
And fighter jets will be shot down very quickly if the opposing force has sophisticated SAM or drones, as shown by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Fighter jets do have the advantage of helping Air Force officers get laid. Drones are much less effective in this regard”
“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump stated in in a video on his campaign website, so even if there are cuts to big programs like the F-35, overall spending may increase. That would mean major investments in new programs, presumably ones with the sort of high-tech pizzazz favored by the DOGE.
As the original Tweet indicated, Musk is a big fan of drones and lots of them, having previously Tweeted that “Drone swarm battles are coming that will boggle the mind.”
At the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London Musk said that “any future wars between advanced countries, or at least countries with drone capability, will be very much the drone wars.”
