Elon Musk ville eliminere F-35 prosjektet, men det skal ikke skje - DefenseDaily

 

Pictured is an F-35A Lightning II with the 355th Fighter Squadron in a weather shelter at Eielson AFB, Alaska on Nov. 13th. "During the winter months temperatures in interior Alaska will often reach 20 below zero, challenging crew chiefs to maintain and sustain one of the U.S. Air Force’s most valuable assets in one of the world’s coldest regions," the U.S. Air Force said (Air Force Photo)

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By Frank Wolfe |
3 days ago |
12/05/2024

Elon Musk had his 4-year-old son X Æ A-12, or “X” for short, on his shoulders when the SpaceX billionaire emerged from a meeting with Capitol Hill legislators on Thursday afternoon. As the reportorial herd behind the rope lines shouted questions about “conflicts of interest,” Musk smiled before sauntering on and disappearing again.

Musk is the Trump designee to head a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with fellow tech mogul Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk and Ramaswamy have pledged to cut government significantly–their most prominent targets being DEI initiatives, personnel, and programs they view as wasteful or unaligned with “American values.”

One program that Musk turned his attention to just before Thanksgiving on his X social media platform is the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 (Defense Daily, Nov. 25). Musk wrote that the “F-35 design was broken at the requirements level because it was required to be too many things to too many people” and disparaged the fighter as “a s–t design” and “an expensive and 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 [and] will just get pilots killed,” according to Musk.

Some talking heads read that as a Delphic oracle of doom for the fifth-generation fighter, which has struggled with low mission capable rates and sustainment problems at the same time that it has received extensive, possibly excessive, praise from fighter pilots.

The F-35 is not likely to disappear any time soon.

“We’re not gonna eliminate the F-35,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said Thursday in response to a question on Musk’s comments on the F-35.

In a sidebar with a reporter on Thursday during the Capitol Hill meeting with Musk, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), a member of the HASC tactical air and land forces panel, said that it is not yet possible to nix or curtail the F-35 buy “because we don’t have anything else.”

“We can’t throw everything out,” he said. “My best guess would be we need to let the private sector look into the Pentagon and find the solutions to our air defense and offensive capabilities in the future.”

“We have the F-35,” Gimenez said. “We’ve got to keep the F-35. We can’t disarm.”

Are manned fighters obsolete, as Musk asserts? “Not yet,” Gimenez replied. “They’re getting there.”

Asked whether he believes the artificial intelligence-enabled CCA is not yet at the point where fielding is imminent, Gimenez said, “Exactly.”

Yet, he also echoed Musk. “The problem I have with the F-35 is it tried to be too many things to too many people,” Gimenez said. “If you want an air superiority fighter, get an air superiority fighter. If you want a strike fighter, get a strike fighter…We should have learned the lesson of the F-4.”

That tri-service and international fighter initially fielded in 1961, and McDonnell Douglas–now part of Boeing [BA]–built more than 5,000 through 1981–a run that helped make the F-4 a top Cold War combat aircraft.

Lockheed Martin beat Boeing in 2001 in the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) competition. The Marine Corps’ F-35B and Air Force F-35A entered service in 2015-16, while the Navy F-35C became operational in 2019. The company has built more than 1,000 thus far for the U.S. military services and foreign militaries.

Before Lockheed Martin’s 2001 JSF contract win, the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and the United Kingdom developed and signed off on performance requirements–not system specifications–over seven years.

Musk seems to have an affinity for reconnaissance aircraft. He and the Canadian singer Grimes said that they got inspiration for the name of their 4-year-old son, X Æ A-12, pronounced “X Ash A Twelve,” after the Lockheed A-12–the forebear to the SR-71 Blackbird.