Elon Musk declared that “the fighter jet era has passed” during remarks at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida, predicting that autonomous drones will dominate future warfare and calling the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program a threat to national security.
“Locally autonomous drone warfare is where it’s at, where the future will be,” Musk said during a fireside chat with Lt. Gen. John Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center. “It’s not that I want the future to be this, that’s just what the future will be. The fighter jet era has passed.”
Musk’s comments, delivered to an audience of Air Force personnel and defense industry officials, drew hushed murmurs and laughter from the crowd.
Criticism of F-35 Program
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO went further in subsequent posts on X, calling those building manned fighter jets like the F-35 “idiots” and arguing that fighter jets piloted by humans “will be destroyed very quickly.”
“Spending over a trillion dollars on a useless new crewed fighter plane instead of a drone program is severely undermining our national security,” Musk wrote.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, is the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons system. The program’s lifetime costs are projected at approximately $2 trillion through 2088, according to the Government Accountability Office, including $1.58 trillion in sustainment costs and $442 billion in acquisition costs.
A 2025 GAO report found that all 110 F-35 aircraft delivered by Lockheed Martin in 2024 were late by an average of 238 days, up from 61 days in 2023. The report noted that Block 4 modernization costs are over $6 billion more than original estimates, with completion delayed at least 5 years.
Defense Officials Push Back
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall responded to Musk’s criticisms in December 2024, saying: “I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer. He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.”
Brig. Gen. Douglas P. Wickert, commander at Edwards Air Force Base, said in December
