Is Elon Musk Right About the F-35?

I started writing a long thing about this when it happened, but never finished it.

Of course I'm just a fighter groupie. I read a lot of informal stuff about weapons systems, but I don't have any expertise. So the best I can really do is give you the impressions of someone who is slightly more informed about the topic than you probably are.

   My view, FWIW (not much) is:

   Musk is making a mistake that we run into every now and then in such discussions. He's basically arguing:

We're building current technology. But that's dumb because there is an emerging technology that's better.

   But, to paraphrase the much maligned (including by me) Donald Rumsfeld: you got to war with the technology you have, not with the technology you want or wish you had at a later time.

   I see--and, again: not an expert--no way whatsoever to get by without manned fighters for the foreseeable future. Musk might as well argue: Why are we using all these cannons when lasers are better. Well, even in 20 years or whatever when lasers really come into their own, we'll still be using cannons for many purposes. I'd bet my house on it.

   And as for drone swarms: well, I'm not even sure those are on the horizon for air combat. The emerging technology emphasizes big, high-tech (ergo high-cost) drones like the Loyal Wingman / Ghost Bat, Lonshot and Gunslinger. That is, big Loyal-Wingman-type AI drones that will fly alongside and be directed by pilots in manned fighters. Or like Longshot, a drone that carries and fires its own air-to-air missiles, or Gunslinger, a DARPA-level missile armed with cannons.

   Good luck getting low-cost drones up to 50k' at mach 2 to challenge Su-35s...or even MiG 29s...

   Musk also complains that the F-35 is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. That's a different objection, and I think there's some truth in it.

   But do remember that just about every major new weapons system is declared a catastrophic failure at first. Well, maybe not the F-15. I'll bet there were even some panicky articles about the Abrams. People lost their minds about the "death trap" Bradley IFV--wrongly. Now it's a badass. I've come to think that Pentagon weapons development goes like this: it aims to get plausible weapons systems online, knowing that they'll be so-so at first. They give themselves something they can turn into a badass weapon--they don't expect it to be a badass system on day 1.

   I'm no big fan of Fat Amy. She's not going to inspire the kind of adulation that, say, the Raptor inspires among people like me. We're still suck in WWII and Star Wars--we want to see turning dogfights. We want to hear Too close for missiles--going in for guns. But that basically doesn't happen anymore. All engagements are BVR. Fat Amy is no Corvette ZR-1. It's more like a...I dunno...semi-self-driving Tesla with all the latest networked bells and whistles.

   Seems to me that the picture that's emerging is one where we have a lot of different kinds of air-to-air weapons, from networked stealth (better: low-observable) fighters leading the way and directing the attack, through souped-up 4.5-gen F-15EX missile trucks and stealthier F-16s doing Wild Weasel SEAD missions, Loyal-Wingman-type drones, and whatever the NGAD and FA-XX turn out to be...which might be B21s spamming the battlespace with AMRAAMs and RIM-174s...all working together. And, for the foreseeable future, our fleet of 4th-gen fighters--F-15s, F-16s, F-18s--doing the bulk of the work.

   As they say, the F-35 is more like a quarterback, seeing all the battlespace, directing everything else. Not as cool, fast, quick, athletic as the wide receivers...but even more important.

   Something like that, I guess.

   Musk is a smart guy taking snap shots on X-Twitter. He's smart and informed and generally worth taking seriously. Kinda like Trump. But--also kinda like Trump--he's wrong a lot.

   And, seems to me, he's wrong about this.