Musk says jets like F-35 are outdated. Drone technology isn’t there yet.

• Elon Musk criticized the F-35 and described manned fighters as obsolete in the drone age.
• Musk’s comments echo those of technology leaders who are pushing drones over traditional military assets.
• Drones cannot yet replace manned aircraft. Even if they could, a mix of both might be better.

Drones are changing war in ways we never imagined possible. But have we reached the point where unmanned systems can replace high-cost weapons like the F-35 stealth fighter?

Prominent figures in the technology industry say yes. But former fighters and analysts say we’re not there yet and that a replacement may still not be the right decision.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken aim at the Pentagon’s award-winning fifth-generation stealth jet, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. In a series of social media posts about X, he called it idiotic to continue building them and criticized the design. Turning to Ukraine, he also said human-piloted jets were “outdated,” “inefficient” and would “only kill pilots” as drones and aerial threats become more common.

In the Ukraine war, drones monitor and attack enemy vehicles and troop positions. But they are not a replacement for manned jets, which Kiev has long sought in greater numbers, even as the pilots face a difficult air defense environment.

Musk’s comments follow similar remarks from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who last month called tanks “useless” while urging the Army to “give them up” and “buy a drone instead.” Musk went a step further and speculated about how adversaries could defeat the F-35’s stealth.

Musk’s criticism comes as he prepares to crack down on wasteful government spending as part of Trump’s initiative to make the department more efficient. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons system program, with a lifetime cost expected to exceed $2 trillion, and Musk has previously suggested that the F-35, which faced setbacks during its development, The military is not the best solution for this.

Four years ago, the SpaceX founder said a remotely piloted, unmanned combat aircraft would be a better alternative to the F-35 and argued that the future lay in autonomous drone warfare.

This week he said that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones.”

Drones are changing the game

Small, cheap drones are transforming land warfare by providing new options for tactical reconnaissance, targeting solutions and threat maneuvers. In situations where air and sea combat prevails over wide areas, such as a war in the U.S. military’s priority Indo-Pacific theater, these drones are too slow and have insufficient payloads and range to be sufficient.

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The U.S. also needs fast, low-visibility, and maneuverable platforms that can carry advanced sensors and standoff weapons over long distances through potentially contested airspace.

“It’s just not something that small UAVs can do,” said Justin Bronk, an air force analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.

Providing the full range of capabilities for this theater requires larger, more sophisticated platforms at a higher price point. Existing remote-controlled systems meet only a portion of the requirements, some can cost as much as an F-35, and they are vulnerable to increasing electronic warfare and aerial threats.

The US military is actively developing new semi-autonomous and artificial intelligence-controlled aircraft, from pilotless F-16s to collaborative fighter jets where a pilot leads the task, and there are great opportunities in this area but also limitations as the technology not present but ripe.

“If I’m designing an airplane that doesn’t require a human in the cockpit, I could design one that can pull 15G or 20G because you’re no longer worried about human physiology,” says Guy Snodgrass, a retired naval aviator and former senior defense official said.

Without a human pilot, “you could then do away with the cockpit, oxygen generation and a lot of life support systems,” potentially freeing up space for sensors, weapons and more, the former TOPGUN said the instructor, arguing that “there are definitely advantages.”

But without manned fighter aircraft, especially the high-end systems like the F-35, the U.S. risks being “stuck with a huge capability gap for a significant period of time because drone technology and the ability to not only produce them, but also to produce, persist over a longer period of time.” “A way to integrate it militarily and actually use it in a tactically relevant or strategically relevant sense is not yet there,” he said.

Mixing manned fighters with unmanned aircraft

In response to Musk’s comments about their fighter jet this week on joint all-domain operations,” a reference to the jet’s role as a combat quarterback.

The fifth-generation stealth jet is not just a US military aircraft. It is used by nations around the world, with more and more nations planning to build F-35 fleets. That’s because the F-35 is not just a fighter aircraft. It is also a bomber, an electronic warfare aircraft, a surveillance device, a battle management platform and a key communications hub.

An unmanned aircraft cannot yet achieve this capability. “This technology simply doesn’t exist,” said Mark Gunzinger, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot and director of future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

If drones one day have all of these capabilities, there will still be advantages to keeping human pilots on combat missions. Combat is unpredictable and requires decisions in uncertain situations. Autonomous systems may be less prepared to look beyond the data, such as a false radar echo, to make a smart decision.

Machines are stiffer. “The flexibility that human pilots give you to use the machine and the systems it has in place in relatively unforeseen circumstances or in a variety of mission types and circumstances is something that is very difficult to achieve in an automated system is to reproduce,” said Bronk.

For the US military, wargaming scenarios have shown that the better solution is not one or the other, manned or unmanned.

“We need both,” said Gunzinger. “And the biggest impact on warfare, the biggest advance in warfare capabilities and capabilities, is figuring out how to most effectively combine what both bring to the fight. That’s the secret.”

Just as the United States does not depend exclusively on a single energy source, U.S. national security does not depend on a single capability. In this situation, unmanned systems improve manned systems and vice versa. The U.S. military is still figuring out what comes next, but the F-35 is an imperfect but important bridge to the future of air power, whether crewed, unmanned or a mix of both.