Elon Musk is not a fan of the F-35.
The fifth-generation, stealthy, multirole fighter jet, a product of the most expensive weapons program in Defense Department history, is often referred to as the “Swiss Army knife” of combat aircraft because it comes in a traditional Air Force model, a Navy version that can land on an aircraft carrier, and a Marine variant capable of taking off and landing like a helicopter.
But where the Pentagon sees versatility, Musk sees vulnerability — and obsolescence.
“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk posted on his social network X last month. “This made it 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. Will just get pilots killed.”
Ouch.
Musk, who, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, is heading up President-elect Donald Trump’s nongovernmental advisory Department of Government Efficiency, aspires to send humans to Mars but apparently believes the era of manned combat aircraft is ending, if not already over.
Sharing a video on X of a swarm of Chinese drones flying in a carefully choreographed pattern, Musk mused, “Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”
Musk seems to have been triggered by a Bloomberg news item he shared about a recently declassified report from the Defense Department’s Office of Test and Evaluation that found after six years of combat testing, “The overall reliability, maintainability, and availability
of the U.S. fleet [of F-35s] remains below service expectations.”
The report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group, shows “the plane is plagued by reliability and maintenance delays, and guns that apparently still can’t shoot straight,” wrote Mark Thompson, a veteran defense reporter who now blogs for POGO.
Thompson does seem to agree that Musk has a point about the F-35 trying to be too many things to too many people.
“Its design was driven by the Marines’ desire for a warplane with a swiveling nozzle that could take off and land vertically from those smaller amphibious warships,” he writes. “The Pentagon pressed the other services to adjust their blueprints to accommodate the Marines. [It] has ended up as a lousy compromise.”
Critics, like Musk, point to the F-35’s high initial price tag — almost $180 million a plane if you factor in development costs — plus sky-high costs per flying hour, which, assuming the Pentagon buys the planned 2,500 planes by the mid-2040s, will put the total operating cost of the fleet well over $2 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Compare that to the cost of one-way, or “disposable,” drones, and you can see why the casual observer might think the F-35 is too little bang for such big bucks.
The Pentagon is not dismissing the revolution in warfare ushered in by small, cheap, and — against tanks and big stationary targets like oil refineries — lethal drones.
It has a whole program dedicated to producing tens of thousands of attritable, “disposable” drones for a future war with China over Taiwan.
But it argues the F-35, with its stealth, and high-tech networking software, can do what drones cannot.
With a radar signal comparable to the size of a bird, the stealthy F-35 can penetrate enemy air defenses, destroy them, and live to fight another day.
Just ask the Israelis, who used their variant, the F-35I Adir, to take out Iran’s top-of-the-line Russian air defense systems in October, without a single plane lost.
Expensive? Yes. But the Pentagon’s Joint Program Office stands by the F-35 as the backbone of America’s combat air power for decades to come.
“The F-35 remains the cornerstone of the future fighter fleet,” the office’s website reads. “It is the world’s most lethal, survivable, and connected joint strike fighter. It enables the warfighter to dominate the skies in the most challenging combat environments against the world’s most unpredictable adversaries.”
It’s not clear how far Musk will take his vendetta against the F-35.
The plane, despite its troubles, has a strong constituency in Congress, and the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the playbook for its Project 2025, calls for buying more F-35s for the Air Force, on the order of 60 to 80 a year.
The 2025 defense policy bill that outlines priorities for the Pentagon is likely to be passed before Musk’s DOGE effort kicks into high gear, so any attempt to clip the F-35’s wings is likely at least a year away.
And Trump has famously touted the F-35 as the ultimate combat aircraft, because, as he likes to say, “It’s stealth. You can’t see it.”
It is nearly invisible to radar, but not to the human eye.
The F-35 has something else that makes it almost impossible to shoot down: Every state in the union, except for Alaska, has a financial stake in building the plane.
And it’s built with the help of seven partner nations: the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Denmark, and Norway.
It’s not only too big to fail, it’s too big to kill.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Department of Government Efficiency is not a real government department, and, therefore, Musk has no power but one — the ear of an adoring president.
Lockheed Martin, the plane’s maker, is banking that won’t be enough to do what no enemy has yet to do: shoot down America’s premier fighter jet.