Keeping the promise made during the election campaign, Donald Trump recently appointed Elon Musk And Vivek Ramaswamy as co-directors of the program called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). It will be – because it does not yet exist – an entity that cannot be a government department but which can prove influential within the administration Trump and the Republican-led Congress.
His mandate is to cut federal spending and the two (Musk And Ramaswamy), they have made it clear that the Pentagon is in their sights and in words they have already begun to fire the first shots, as happened yesterday: drones are changing war in ways we would never have thought of, we have reached the point where systems without crew can replace expensive weapons like the F-35. Fortunately, military analysts say it is premature, but the fact remains Muskin a series of posts on Xcalled it idiotic to continue building them. Pointing to Ukraine, he said that human-piloted jets, “obsolete and inefficient,” would only “get pilots killed.” It’s a shame that no F-35 has operated in Ukraine to date, but it’s true that never before have drones been protagonists in this conflict.
Elon he is not the first to express these doctrines, similar observations had been made by the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidtwho last month called the tanks useless and suggested the army give them away to buy drones. Returning to the patron of SpaceXhe made the first anti-F-35 outburst in 2021, so now that he will have to deal with “useless public spending”, it is reasonable to expect that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, being the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons systems program , ends up being accused of waste. There is one thing, however: if in scenarios such as the Russian-Ukrainian one even small drones prove effective, on a large scenario such as the Asian-Pacific one the situation changes and that remains a priority front for the United States.
Thank goodness for a technician like Stacie Pettyjohndirector of the Defense Program at the Center for New American Security, reiterated: “Most of the drones the Pentagon is investing in to provide sufficient capability to overwhelm enemy defenses are nowhere near as capable as manned aircraft, they should be cheap so they can be purchased in large quantities and they are not; They do not have robustness or payload capacity characteristics comparable to manned jets and will not be able to replace the capabilities provided by aircraft such as the F-35 or bombers
B-2”. In a theater like the Indo-Pacific, the United States they also need fast, low-observable, highly maneuverable platforms capable of carrying advanced sensors and weapons over great distances and through contested airspace. “It’s not something small drones can do,” he said Justin Bronkairpower analyst at the Royal United Services Institute. It’s true that the U.S. military is actively developing semi-autonomous, AI-driven aircraft, from unmanned F-16s to collaborative fighter planes in which one pilot directs the tasks of multiple aircraft. This space offers immense potential but with limitations, as the technology is not yet mature.
From a technical point of view, the construction of a fighter plane that does not require a human being in the cockpit certainly implies a reduction in the risk of losing the soldier, but above all it entails the possibility of creating a flying machine that could perform maneuvers with enormous accelerations. which human physiology cannot resist. Finally, to be able to install on board the equivalent of the weight of the pilot, the instruments and the seat (over 300 kg), in as many electronic systems or weapons. In response to comments from Musk on Xa spokesperson for Lockheed Martin (the company that builds the F-35), told the newspaper BusinessInsider that the Joint Strike Fighter is “the world’s most advanced, resilient and connected fighter aircraft, a vital deterrent and the cornerstone of joint operations across every domain, land, air and sea. The fifth-generation stealth jet is not only a military combat aircraft used around the world, but also a bomber, an electronic warfare aircraft, a surveillance tool, a battle management platform and a key communications node. No drone can yet match that capability any more than it can make immediate, unpredictable decisions like a fighter pilot. And all the simulations and exercises done today lead to the conclusion that drones and planes are both necessary.
