Why is Elon Musk wrong on F-35 and sort of wrong on unmanned fighters?

so Elon Musk made a few posts touching upon F-35 and unmanned fighter jets in General on his ex account and created a big hoopla that wasn't the first time he talked about fighter jets but musk was just a bystander then this time musk has Trump's here he's also the co-leader of an advisory body to Trump's government Dodge that being said it should come to no surprise that whatever musk advises May in some form have an actual effect on Trump's government and then in turn on the Pentagon so this video will go over what musk said on F-35 stealth Jets and unmanned Fighters and explain where musk was wrong and where he was [Music] right for unmanned Jets to work safe day telling communication is crucial the US military uses 128 to 256bit encryption the latter is basically impenetrable even for for today's supercomputers today's sponsor expressvpn uses 256-bit encryption it creates a virtual tunnel between your device and the internet the connection is routed via their plentiful servers to 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time and thanks to the 30-day money back guarantee there is no risk involved so find out how you can get a great discount plus 3 months of expressvpn for free by clicking the link in the description box below Express cbn.com/international side the repost meanwhile some idiots are still building man fighter jets like the F-35 that post kicked off a whole series of comments and posts we'll get to them in detail but here's a quick sample his initial video repost can be viewed in two ways let's assume he didn't mean it literally as simple light show quadcopters are completely different from unman aircraft that might compare with fighter jets if we look at musk's comment symbolically he may have meant some sort of quad copters designed for military use and some sort of drone swarms are superior to man Fighters but that too would be wrong quadcopters simply can't do the missions that fighter jets are tasked to do fpv drones can usually cover 10 mil at best before running out of battery large multi-rotor drones let's say even larger than Ukrainian babayaga may be able to cover even 100 miles but what are they going to do slowly approach Taiwan from China and drop a bomb their survivability would be such that you'd be better off with a kamikazi drone or a missile which is not what fighter jets do and let's remember that's just 100 miles today's fighter jets usually cover 700 to 900 miles such large drones are still essentially wingless rotor craft they struggle with altitude and speed and as they're large they're fairly sluggish and their radar signature is bigger than the radar signature of a stealthy jet they would be fairly easy to detect track and shoot down one argument is that drones could be made to operate in swarms without external input and have those swms contain thousands of drones but a that technology still hasn't been proven light show drones maintain formations using methods that are simply not available to fighter jets close to enemy territory even in Ukraine drones are still basically solitary attackers B that still doesn't solve the endurance payload and speed limitation and C one-way missions are not the point of a fighter jet a bit later musk also said this crude Fighters are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs are usable drone can do it without the overhead of a human pilot so musk does understand the role of a fighter jet he's not advocating for Mass kamikazi drone attacks often weapons needed in Wars today are heavy and plentiful we are talking two tons of bombs or missiles per jet or several airto a missiles today four long range amam class airto aair missiles is the minimum Pro jet amam sized missiles while not heavy still take up room B basically to do air-to-air combat a crewless drone needs to be a lot larger than a quadcopter and feature Wings a jet engine and so on basically it needs to be a fighter jet without a pilot andreil and general atomics are two companies that got a contract with the Pentagon to develop such fighter jet drones those are going to be one of the first unmanned air combat jets ever anywhere should enter service by 2029 or so one of the two designs is visibly larger though both are quite a bit lighter than even an F-16 let alone a modern stealthy jet the US Air Force still did not choose which direction to go in and they both have limitations they can't carry heavy loads putting two tons of bombs onto an aircraft weighing 3 tons empty basically means it's lucky to have any room left for fuel cutting the payload to 1 ton half of what an F-16 would carry might allow the Drone to carry approximately the fuel it would otherwise need to match f-16's range and the F35 carries more mind you let's look at what those two drone proposals do not have andel's design lacks stealth general atomic design can carry some weapons internally but overall it still does not match the F35 stealth so those drone proposals are going to be detected and tracked more often than the F35 shut down more often and on top of all that they will hold less payload they will not quite match the range of the F35 and they will have issues with sensors not being as powerful and as advanced their only Advantage is price and availability the US Air Force's desire is to have drones cost not more than a quarter to a third of F35 so you can solve the payload issue by having more drones sharing more weapons among them but you can't get greater radar range by using more numerous weak radars and the flight range issue is unsolvable two planes with a range of 300 mil can't do the mission of a plane that reaches 600 miles so some of those approaches are going to hike up the price tag of a fighting formation if you need two planes to carry as many weapons if you need two planes to survive long enough to even fire a weapon compared to one F35 then the monetary calculus changes from 4 to1 to 2:1 that's what giving a huge benefit of a do to drones when it comes to their survivability besides stealth and self- defenses their software is simply a mystery sure if it works perfectly if it can perform as well as a pilot when it comes to autonomy then such loss ratios might be valid but who's to say we're going to be at that point by 2030 or 2035 the US Air Force certainly doesn't know that's why its sixth generation fighter project is currently being re-evaluated the Air Force is chasing a moving Target they don't know what capabilities will be there in 5 or 10 Years yet they have to invest tens of billions to not start falling behind China the Air Force is currently hoping that the future drone fighter jets will be more autonomous and capable the Pentagon is already planning brand new drone jet designs to come in early 2030s and they will be quote more exotic which likely means more expensive the the best feature of drone Jets is that they should be plentiful if that works as it's planned then losing several such jet drones rather than one man jet won't be a big deal instead of 80 or so f-35s that the US is procuring now per year future jet drones may be procured by their hundreds each year for a world scale War being able to replace a thousand planes quickly using a few different plants and makers may be crucial it's the volume that may win future Wars even if drones are not fully autonomous but the Air Force is unsure of it all yet musk talks as if he knows he doesn't he says a drone can do it all without human input but he's not the one investing tens of billions and making the hard choices it's still too early to make big calls on the survivability of drones in 2035 maybe but not today musk also said Jets will be shot down quickly by a peer opponent maybe but what's really the difference between a 20 ton F35 and a 5ton unmanned jet they're both large they're both going at similar speeds and they're both susceptible to missiles that's even assuming the Drone has the same stealth levels as the F35 which if it does May imply it's not 3 to four times cheaper sure the Drone lacks a pilot and may be able to do Maneuvers featuring some several more G's than a pilot but that won't save it from a missile evading missiles like the Patriot sm6 or amam you need to either Jam their guidance provide the decoy Target to them or if sufficiently far away use speed to change course and bleed the missile's own speed and energy that's providing that you even know when an enemy missile is going to hit you which small and cheap drone Jets will generally do badly as you need expensive sensors to be able to get timely warning AI may have done well in simulated dog fighting but that has much fewer variables than a multitude of combat situations possible over a wide Battlefield musk actually elaborated on stealth in another post of his sure stealth planes Are Not Invisible but his post seems to imply he's talking about visual queuing but guess what that's already what the F35 is using it's called the distributed aperture system and it's great but it's no replacement for radar as it lacks range ranging and erection data Radars can be helpful in a myriad of other situations so far Optical and thermal cameras are being used as a secondary detection tool but everyone from the US to China is still primarily relying on ever more sensitive Radars waging the battle with ever more advanced stealth so does musk recommend using non- stealthy unmanned Jets sure that's a valid idea that the US Air Force is unsure about as well but if you enable all those enemy raadar to work to their full potential you give the enemy opportunity to fire at those drones from much much longer distances giving the enemy much more time to fire many more missiles it may be very questionable if four times cheaper drones will be able to compensate for that and remember if you go with even smaller and even cheaper drones something much lighter than 2 to 3 tons you simply can't do range payload and so on it's still likely about volume outnumbering the enemy then musk said this future Wars are all about drones and Hypersonic weapons fighter jets piloted by humans will get destroyed very quickly well musk is not wrong there he didn't provide a timeline but no one knows how close we are to set day technology hasn't been tested let alone proven it may well be that we are 20 years away from set point probably not much less as time to develop and mass produce a complex system takes over a decade the us or China can't afford to stop perfecting current man Jets and just go all in on unmanned Tech both are being worked on simultaneously and without proof even said the next generation won't quickly see ramped up production of thousands of drones that are supposed to operate fully autonomously so that's further years of testing and proving the concept musk may be all about speed and efficiency but it's been years and Tesla's autopilot is not good enough yet it's been years and his Starship rocket is not mature enough complex Technologies need a lot of time to mature musk also disparaged the F35 jet as a design and program and he sort of has some decent points there a compromised design is never going to excel at certain requirements the Pentagon hoped a jack of all trades approach would lead to lower costs it also didn't anticipate China Rising so fast both proved the Pentagon wrong but we don't really know how much would three or four different Jets cost either to develop or to sustain right now the Pentagon is stuck with the F-35 they can't stop making it as China is quickly making Advanced planes in huge numbers the Pentagon doesn't have Alternatives until next Generation jets are plentiful which is plausibly 10 years away way that's why unmanned wingman jets are going to be flying with f-35s to help them it's never about just one system but about systems working together but perhaps the most dangerous of all musk's posts was one where he was almost making a political policy statement having Trump's ear such statements may be quite dangerous not just to the F-35 but to the pentagon's air power while it's unlikely musk and even Trump himself self have enough sway to really stop such a massive and mature program like the F35 it still probably leaves many US generals very nervous sixth generation Jets and drones may prove to be awesome but they're not here yet and if a war with China happens in 2 years time the US would be in a tricky situation if its only fighter jet was out of production restarting production to the same volume takes years finishing development of the Next Generation needs years years that the Pentagon may not have and remember bov may talk about war but only real peace can bring us all together [Music]