Musk calls for replacing fighter jets with drones

Billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Donald Trump to head a commission charged with cutting US federal spending, on Monday expressed his support for replacing modern fighter jets with drones. 

"Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones. They only kill pilots",declared the head of SpaceX and Tesla on its X platform.

Elon Musk has particularly attacked the F-35, a fighter plane from the American manufacturer Lockheed Martin and considered the jewel of the US air force since it entered service in 2015.

"Meanwhile, some idiots continue to build manned fighter planes like the F-35," he reacted on Sunday by publishing a video in which hundreds of drones can be seen at dozens of meters in the air.

Contracts have recently been signed to export F-35s, fifth-generation stealth aircraft, to Romania, Poland and Germany.

Detractors criticize their complexity and high cost.

The design of the F-35 is deficient "because too many things were demanded of it," declared Elon Musk on Monday, for whom this plane has become a "complex and expensive" machine without any speciality in combat.

For Mauro Gilli, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, "what makes the F-35 (...) expensive is the software and the electronic components, not the pilot itself."

"It is important because a reusable drone would need all the bulky electronic components of the F-35," the researcher said on the X network.

He also stressed that the existence of a program with technologies as advanced as the F-35 forces America's rivals to embark on another to counter it, particularly in advanced radars.

"By the mere fact of existing, the F-35 and the B-1 force Russia and China to make strategic decisions that they would not otherwise have to make (i.e. allocate budgetary resources)," he said.

"Even if Musk were right (and he is not)" the elimination of these planes would reduce the inconveniences to which America's rivals are subjected, added Mauro Gilli.