MAKICHUK: Musk slams costly F-35 in push for unmanned fighter planes
But is the SpaceX billionaire's dream of robotic air warfare really achievable today?
"There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot … the best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best."
— Chuck Yeager
Elon Musk, who has long advocated for drones, took aim at manned jet fighters and Lockheed’s F-35 in particular in a post last month on X, writing that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones.”
In another post, he claimed “a reusable drone” can do everything a jet fighter can do “without all the overhead of a pilot.”
Normally, no one would care what the Space X/Tesla billionaire thinks or says on the military front, but his renewed push to kill piloted planes has taken on new significance in light of his deepening influence with the incoming president.
Musk’s comments aren’t surprising given his stewardship of Tesla, a pioneer of self-driving car technology, and SpaceX, which builds autonomous space vehicles, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Also not surprisingly, Air Force officials took the comments in stride, considering that Musk has never ever been in a circuit or landed an aircraft, let alone fought in air combat.
Asked about Musk’s recent comments, a senior Air Force officer who oversees flight testing, including of the F-35, said that moving fully to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is impossible for the foreseeable future.
“There may be some day when we can completely rely on roboticized warfare but we are a century away,” Brigadier General Doug Wickert told the Journal. “How long have we thought full self-driving was going to be on the Tesla?”
Wickert said he’s flown planes with AI capabilities, “and it is mind-boggling how good it is.” But these are incremental changes, he said, not Musk’s approach, which he describes as, “We want Rome built in seven days.”
The Air Force is still building F-35 stealth jet fighters, a program whose total costs are expected to exceed US$2 trillion over several decades.
At the same time, the service is pushing forward with a combat drone system, as well as a next-generation crewed fighter — the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program that succeeds the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.
Is there some truth to what Musk is saying?
Yes, there is.
If you eliminate the pilot from the aircraft, you can eliminate a whole host of systems designed to keep him alive. Fewer systems, less maintenance.
Furthermore, range can be extended — a pilotless plane doesn’t get sleepy or tired, or is affected by extreme G-forces. It also boasts ultra-fast decision-making.
And the biggest savings — UAVs require little or no pilot training costs.
The cost of training a U.S. Air Force pilot varies widely depending on the type of aircraft, anywhere from US$1 million to over US$13 million.
They can also be used for high-risk missions with zero risk of losing any human pilots. Even when the enemy badly outnumbers them, unmanned craft may be used to attack and reduce enemy numbers, effectively sacrificing themselves.
Currently, drones are controlled by a human pilot who is far away. Their link is usually by radio, which is vulnerable to jamming and takeover by enemy ECM (electronic countermeasures) systems.
However, Autonomous Fighters (AF) feature onboard AI systems that are immune to external ECM taking over or inhibiting control.
So that is all well and good, but can it equal a highly experienced pilot, in a dogfight?
A simulation in 2020 handed the AI fighter a 5-0 victory — but that was a computer sim, not a real-time test.
More recently, an AI fighter pilot faced off against a human pilot in a “dogfight” using actual jets in the air — a huge milestone.
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) decided to test the concept by training an AI to operate a fighter jet during a close-range battle.
A total of 21 test flights were conducted for the project between December 2022 and September 2023, the Department of Defense said in an ACE (Air Combat Evolution) program update.
More than 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes were made over time to improve the tools, DefenseScoop reported.
“We actually took the X-62A (a modified F-16) and flew it against a live manned F-16. We built up in safety using the maneuvers — first defensive, then offensive, then high aspect nose-to-nose engagements where we got as close as 2,000 feet at 1,200 miles per hour,” Lt. Col. Maryann Karlen, deputy commandant of the test pilot school said.
The exercise marked “the first AI vs human within-visual-range engagement (a.k.a. ‘dogfight’), conducted with actual manned F-16 aircraft,” DefenseScoop reported.
Alas, the military won't say who won the first real-world dogfight due to national security concerns. However, officials say the dogfight went well and that the program is progressing faster than expected.
Legendary USAF war veteran and test pilot Chuck Yeager, once said:
“In the end, experience is what counts. The more experience you have, the better you are. And that's true of anything you do in airplanes, dogfighting in combat, or anything like that. Your chances of coming out on top depend on your experience level. The more experience you can get, the better chance you have of surviving in a war, or in any situation where you are faced with an emergency.”
When it comes to Air Dominance, piloted planes still appear to be the way to go, Elon’s imagination notwithstanding.
If China attacks Taiwan tomorrow, our best hopes are with piloted military aircraft.
The F-35 program would also be difficult, if not impossible, to cancel given international orders and partnerships, and support from lawmakers whose districts benefit from the work.
This despite, a program that continues to be plagued with delays, cost overruns and design and software challenges.
Meanwhile, the Air Force is also pushing forward with a new drone program called Collaborative Combat Aircraft to build roughly 1,000 unmanned aircraft to fly alongside manned jet fighters like the F-35 and NGAD, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Anduril and General Atomics are currently building prototypes for the program, ahead of an Air Force decision expected on which company will build the new aircraft.
Some are also raising questions about the influence of tech leaders, like Musk, whose company stands to benefit from shifts in military spending.
SpaceX stands to gain potentially millions of dollars from an expansion of its Starshield constellation, a militarized version of its Starlink internet satellites that is designed to support, among other things, drone communications, The Journal reported.
Musk also has close ties to defense-tech startups including Anduril, which is building the very autonomous drones he is publicly pushing to replace jet fighters.
So, are we ready today, for a flood of pilotless aircraft?
National security experts say AI tests or computer simulations shouldn’t be taken too seriously because the fog and friction of war is far more complex.
Against a sophisticated adversary, “your unmanned drones would fall out of the sky like raindrops,” said Mark Lewis, a former Pentagon official.
“We aren’t ready for the autonomous system to replace the human system,” Lewis said, “but we are ready for the autonomy system to augment the human pilot.”
