Musk’s attack on F-35s fuels debate over expensive fighter jets

Elon Musk, charged with cracking down on waste across the US federal government, has recently singled out one particular target: the Pentagon’s costly fleet of F-35 fighter jets. 

An advocate of autonomous technology, Musk has spent the past few weeks mocking the Lockheed Martin-built aircraft on social media. His comments have added fuel to a debate gripping the defence industry and its customers: does the military still need expensive piloted fighter jets at a time when budgets are pressured and increasingly sophisticated drones are deployed to devastating effect in Ukraine and elsewhere?

“In the same way that mainframe computers got replaced by personal computers and smartphones, are these big manned platforms still going to be relevant in the same way, now that we have other systems that are unmanned and expendable,” said Lorenz Meier, chief executive of US-based Auterion, which is developing software to enable swarms of autonomous drones to communicate with each other. 

Although Auterion was not advocating “closing the door” to crewed systems, given the rapid development of AI-powered unmanned systems, there was a “fundamental question” around their future role that needed to be addressed, he added.

In the US, the Air Force earlier this month announced it would delay a decision, originally expected at the end of 2024, on which company would build a new fighter jet as part of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) programme. The move means that it will now fall to the incoming Trump administration on whether and how to proceed with the project.

Lockheed Martin said it would work with the “incoming administration, just as we did during President Trump’s first term”.

The debate itself is not new — the F-35 was regarded by many as the last piloted fighter that would end up being built — but it holds major implications for traditional defence contractors like Lockheed Martin, as well as technology start-ups and drone developers eager to expand in the military market. It also comes as western governments consider expensive plans for the next generation of fighter aircraft to replace current models. 

The programmes — in particular the tri-national Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) between the UK, Italy and Japan and the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS) — were all conceived before the Ukraine conflict turbocharged the development of drones.

Both GCAP and FCAS presumed that a central fighter jet would be piloted while being surrounded by drones. 

The “basic state of affairs is that it is to a greater or lesser extent still being debated within [the three next generation programmes] whether the central fighter is to be piloted or not,” said Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. A later planned programme launch would mean more progress potential for autonomous technology, added Bronk.

GCAP, which on the industry side is led by Britain’s BAE Systems, Italy’s Leonardo and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has the most ambitious timetable. It has pledged to have a fighter aircraft in service by 2035 and most experts believe it will end up being piloted.

The Franco-German-Spanish programme, on the other hand, is targeting around 2040, potentially giving its industrial partners Airbus and Dassault Aviation more time to take into account progress on autonomous technology before making a final decision, according to analysts. 

Michael Schoellhorn, chief executive of Airbus Defence & Space, recently acknowledged that given the long lead time and current geopolitical tensions, it made sense to accelerate the development of the programme’s autonomous systems in the shorter-term.  

“We need to reflect upon what capabilities would [FCAS] deliver at what point in time,” he told the Financial Times in a recent interview. The Russian threat meant that there was an urgent need to bring some capabilities forward to the early 2030s, “especially on the drone part”, he said.

Any decision to get rid of piloted fighters completely would have far-reaching consequences not just for the military but also for the industry and is regarded as unlikely by most experts.

From an industrial perspective, manufacturers would lose a big chunk of their revenues which they generate from serving and maintaining aircraft. The “dominant reason why most countries are doing this [is] to sustain their fighter industries because they are an important part of a very high-skilled industrial base,” said Bronk.

Operationally, fighter jets are still far more capable than today’s unmanned systems. There is a “whole host of things” that fighter jets currently do that is very difficult to do with an uncrewed system with the technology that currently exists, said Bronk. 

“A lot of stuff that fighter jets do and are used for, relies on there being a pilot in them to make judgments, to provide reassurance,” he said.

Today’s remotely-controlled systems also still lack the range and the survivability of more expensive fighter aircraft. Drones are vulnerable to electronic warfare and surface-to-air threats. More complex unmanned systems are also not that cheap.  

If drones were the “only solution for military problems, we would not expect to see Ukraine wanting manned combat aircraft and armour vehicles,” said Byron Callan, managing director of research group Capital Alpha Partners, in a recent note. Nor, he added, would “China be building J-20 combat aircraft and manned naval vessels and maintaining the largest tank force in the world”. 

Others also point out that fighter jets will play an expanded role in the next generation programmes.

The “crewed aircraft component of NGAD . . . won’t just be a fighter,” said Mark Gunzinger, director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a strong supporter of the F-35. It will be a “fighter, a strike aircraft, a penetrating sensor, a battlespace manager and an electronic attack aircraft”. 

Wargaming scenarios for the US military, added Gunzinger, had all “validated the need to maintain a balanced crewed force well into the future” and that while AI will help, it will “not replace what humans bring to the fight”.

Ultimately, he argues, it will be the combination of both crewed and uncrewed systems that will “yield a leap-ahead in warfighting capability and capacity”.