SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took several swipes at the Pentagon's F-35 program over the past two days as well as at the "idiots" who continue to build the stealth fighter jet.
Musk, who has been tasked by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy in his new administration, signaled that the $2 trillion lifetime cost of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, developed by Lockheed Martin, could be a subject of his cost-reduction recommendations.
"The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people," Musk said in a post on X on Monday, days after a declassified Pentagon study on the fighter jet detailed reliability and security woes, Bloomberg reported.
"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 added.
That followed Musk's Sunday post alongside a video of synchronized Chinese drones, in which he blasted "idiots" who "are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35."
"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 Sunday. "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."
The Pentagon released a statement defending the program.
"We have combat capable aircraft in operation today and they perform exceptionally well against the threat for which they were designed," a spokesperson said. "Pilots continually emphasize that this is the fighter they want to take to war if called upon."
The F-35 is expected to remain in service until 2088 at an estimated cost of more than $2 trillion over its lifetime, the Government Accountability Office wrote in May, even as the military planned to fly it less, it said.
Musk vowed during Trump's campaign that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.
In a guest opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last week, Musk and Ramaswamy criticized several areas of waste within the federal government, the Pentagon among them.
"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.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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