Summary
Lockheed Martin UK’s chief, Paul Livingston, defended the F-35 stealth jet program after Elon Musk called it obsolete due to advances in unmanned drones.
Livingston emphasized the F-35’s unmatched capabilities, including stealth, battlefield data-sharing, and cost-efficiency by replacing multiple aircraft types.
While Musk labeled the program overly expensive and poorly designed, Livingston argued drones alone can’t match the F-35’s capabilities or defend against threats like China’s J20 jets.
Despite criticism over cost and reliability, the F-35 remains integral to NATO defenses, with widespread adoption across 19 nations, including the UK.
Elon might have an accident with his Special K.
The guy that can’t deliver self driving cars wants to talk about self driving planes?
The cars were going to fly short distances too.
He said he was going to use monopropellant thrusters to make his cars fly.
Hopefully I do not need to point out the many reasons this is a very bad idea, if not functionally impossible.
He also said he was working on an electric aircraft at one point.
Other companies have actually made such things… not Musk though.
To be fair™ planes are a bit easier. Fewer obstacles up there and typically a lot of things broadcast that they are there. They were landing the Russian space shuttle by computer in the 80s.
No one was jamming the Russian space shuttle, or shooting missiles at it.
It’s one thing to have an autonomous landing program on an aircraft, it’s another thing entirely to have a program that can react to surface to air missiles, enemy jamming, and over the horizon air to air missiles.
Elon musk is an idiot if he thinks a drone can replace all of the capabilities of even an F22, let alone the F35, which is a multi-role aircraft capable of handling all of the above and more. The F35 can jam, do reconnaissance, network with friendly fighters to fire over the horizon missiles, and drop bombs that weigh 1000 times what a drone can carry. Was it a good use of tax dollars considering the budget overruns? Probably not. But can it be replaced by drone swarms? Hell no. The F35 is an unmatched weapons platform, that’s why nato countries have been buying them.
Every word out of elons mouth is complete and utter bs.
Elon is such an idiot.
This is the same shit he pulled back when he pushed drones as a solution to all those kids trapped in a cave. They weren’t even remotely viable, and when human beings rescued them, he called the leader of that successful operation a “pedo” for absolutely no reason other than his own childish idiocy.
he called the leader of that successful operation a “pedo” for absolutely no reason other than his own childish idiocy.
I think it’s darker than that. Their solution involved doping the kids so they were heavily sedated during transport. This was out of fear they would panic and threaten their own life and that of the person transporting them.
The dark part is how Musk’s mind associated sedating a child to make them more docile with sexual assault.
He tried the “have sex with me and I’ll buy you a toy, but you can’t tell anyone” routine with a worker and got caught. Now he knows those tactics don’t work as well on adults.
he called the leader of that successful operation a “pedo” for absolutely no reason other than his own childish idiocy.
Come on Muskrat call the CEO of Lockheed Martin a pedo
Normally I’m opposed to the MIC drone striking US citizens, but apparently there are some exceptions
One is an example of a team of people doing what elon’s dumb solution shouldn’t. The F-35 isn’t a solution to anything other than funneling tax dollars to Lockheed, and he’s dumb for thinking drones will replace everything, but not much more stupid than people seriously defending and advocating for the F-35 to replace everything, let alone anything
The bad stories about the F-35 are greatly exaggerated. The niche it fills is lugging 18,000 pounds of ordnance into contested air without getting shot down. Something the A-10 is less and less capable of every year. In the future, the development roadmap, they want the F-35 to use it’s electronics to guide arsenal drones in that bring even more ordnance. In an air to air fight one F-35 out in front can already launch all of the AIM-174s that a Super Hornet can carry, before the F/A-18 can even see the targets. Vastly improving survivability and deadliness.
There’s several very good reasons to use these things.
All those reasons have nothing to do with the reliability. It sounds nice (insofar as anything military can sound nice), but they still break down a lot more often than other fighter jets. Literally read this in a report from the pentagon iirc, though it was like 10 years ago and maybe they finally make it out of stuff other than tin and cardboard
Here’s the thing; every bad thing you’ve ever heard about the F-35 comes either directly or indirectly from Pierre Sprey.
And Pierre Sprey also believed that modern aircraft shouldn’t have missiles or radar. He is not a man to be taken seriously, and neither are his criticisms of the F-35.
The criticism I’ve heard came from flag officers making statements like “It can’t run, can’t climb, and can’t fight”…
No, most of the bad things I’ve heard about the F-35 come from stories and reports of how they break down and malfunction a lot more often than other fighter jets. Is that just made up by Sprey and the reports of it not working are just lies?
“Fifth columnist says top of the line weapons system that is already paid for and being fielded is actually fucking stupid and you should totally divest from it and pursue some vague futuretech solution.”
It’s all so tiresome.
