Rebuttal Cable - Elon Musk Is Dead Wrong on F-35s: listening to him would only please Russia and China.

Musk vs. the F-35: Dangerously out of his depth.

• Musk attacked the F-35 fighter jet program: undermining it as a wasteful costly endeavor.

• Musk’s initial repost of a video critiquing the F-35 included his remark that “manned fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs” and that drones could do the job without the overhead of a human pilot.

• While the F-35 program has faced its share of criticism, Musk’s arguments lack nuance and overlook key realities.

• We will unpack these below - explaining precisely why Musk is so wrong on F-35s.

• But before all that, a good quick and dirty heuristic to evaluate a proposed foreign/defense policy is this: would our adversaries benefit from this proposal? would they be happy to have this proposal implemented?

• The answer is obvious: if the U.S. President and decision-makers were to listen to Musk and somehow cancel the F-35 program, the countries most pleased with the news would be Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

• A good rule of thumb is therefore the following: don’t please your enemies.

• And canceling the F-35s based on a totally misguided costs and benefit analysis would do just that.

• In fact, one shouldn’t be surprised if Russian trolls on social media platforms like X, were to suddenly diversify their portfolio currently concentrated on the Ukraine war and begin boosting Musk’s misinformation to encourage the new admin to cancel the F-35 fighter jet program.

• Let us now delve into many different reasons for Musk being so spectacularly wrong on the F-35s:

• 1) Most of the costs are caused by the fancy software - not pilot overheads.

• What makes the F-35s so expensive is the advanced software and electronics - not pilots.

• And any unmanned platforms/drones that could/would replace the F-35s would need to be equipped with similarly expensive tech.

• In fact, we already have advanced remote operated drones like the Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk - which at a cost of $220m are more than 2x as expensive as an F-35.

• 2) Misconceptions around reusability.

• Musk claims that a “crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs. A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot.”

• But musk misses the crucial point that without stealth, reusability becomes a moot point.

• To operate effectively in contested airspace, an aircraft must reduce its detectability across various spectrums—electromagnetic, thermal, and acoustic.

• And this is the essence of stealth.

• And without this stealth any aircraft entering heavily defended airspace risks being detected and destroyed.

• In fact, that very aforementioned Global Hawk that costs 2.2x of a F-35, while an impressive platform for reconnaissance, is still non-stealthy, and thus unsuitable for contested environments.

• For that very reason, Iran was able to shoot down the U.S. Navy’s Triton variant of the Global Hawk in 2019.

• And yet that very same Iran would almost certainly not be able to shoot down any B-21,B2 or F-35s over its airspace.

• In fact, the only ever recorded successful hit against a stealth aircraft was the 1999 downing of an F-117 Nighthawk during the Kosovo War.

• And even then, the success was not due to the radar.

• In fact, Serbs were using outdated radars.

• What happened instead was that:

• 1) The U.S. Air Force repeatedly used the same flight route, making it predictable;

• 2) Yugoslavian forces employed spotters near Aviano Air Base to provide early warning of aircraft departures - this is important, they literally spotted the departure of the F-117 and given the previous point, approximated its future whereabouts in space over Serbia, and;

• 3) Serbs knew that no aircrafts were flying in the corridor used by the F-117 - so they blindly launched the soviet-made SA-3 surface-to-air missiles in the hope that they would have a hit.

• So overall, this was not some advanced radar defeating stealth: rather, this was Serbs being crafty with human intelligence on the ground, and American planners showing signs of complacency in using the same route over and over again.

• It is simply inconceivable that even the most modern radars employed by adversaries like the Russian Nebo - M (which Ukraine destroyed quite easily with the use of U.S. missiles) would do much in the way of stealth.

• Critics who dismiss stealth while championing reusability fail to explain how the latter can exist without the former.

• 3) The F-35’s role and design.