In an F-35 Funding Fight, Musk Will Need to Win Over a Skeptical Congress and Trump

Just weeks after President-elect Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk with cutting government spending, the SpaceX CEO criticized the Pentagon's most expensive weapons program: the F-35.

Musk called the jet's design "shit" and derided the "idiots" making the fifth-generation stealth fighter, which is widely considered a cornerstone of US airpower. His comments suggest he could be eyeing the $2 trillion F-35 program, and possibly other fighter jets, for potential spending cuts.

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"Augmenting F-35s with unmanned systems would be valuable, but unmanned systems are no replacement," he said. Canceling the fighter altogether "would be one of the biggest gifts imaginable for America's enemies," he said.

Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, told BI that the US can't replace crewed aircraft with drones in the near term anyway. The technology isn't advanced enough yet.

She said that the Pentagon has not yet fielded fully lethal autonomous weapons "that are sophisticated and can make sense of their environments, decide what to do, and act fully on their own."

"Almost all of the drones that exist today are remotely piloted or at most semi-autonomous," she said. "Developing the autonomy responsibly and then deciding that we have trust in it to send it on extremely consequential missions that is the long pole in the tent."

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