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.
Every word out of elons mouth is complete and utter bs.
Elon thinks bcz he’s rich the defense contractors can’t get him? Michael Hastings got ended bcz he talked a little too much about a general.
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.
if lithium battery fires were bad, i’m sure that firefighters are thrilled to see hydrazine fires, several hundreds of kg at a time, after random crashes. lmao. what the fuck was he thinking?
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.
Oh yeah Elon is a wanker for sure. I just wanted to point out that though they seem similar the problem spaces are different
all from the power of one potato no less!
On one hand, unmanned airplanes (drones or remote controlled) will outfly anything with a human on board, because humans are generally the weakest part of the plane. No human = no cockpit or life support, no hatch, no windows, no ejection seats, etc. An equivalent drone plane will be lighter, more structurally sound, and can maneuver at g-forces that will kill a human pilot.
That’s the hardware side of things, of course.
The software and information security is definitely not there yet… But I’m sure Elon thinks it’ll be ready “next year” just like Full Self Driving…
It’s expensive, sure.
In some cases, it has no use. In a small Eastern European country, it makes more sense to buy drones, artillery and air defense. If the possible opponent is right next to you, an airfield hosting the F-35 would simply be smashed with ballistic missiles, leaving the fighter homeless. The same money in the form of other items would serve one better.
Far over the ocean, far in the rear - different things make sense. Projecting force quickly to a big distance or intredicting an opponent that does that - requires fighter jets.
For a country whose threat model involves supersonic bombers launching hypersonic missiles at its navy or shipping or coastline from beyond air defense range - that cannot be solved with today’s drones, but can be solved with F-35: “intercept the bombers before they launch anything, destroy their airfields”. Drones cannot currently stop a stealth fighter, or even stop an ordinary fighter: it will outrun them and possibly run circles around them.
Drones of the future? Could take any form. Maybe some day, the F-35 is indeed a mobile command post in the sky and drones do the hard job. But not currently.
what a take
yeah this must be why south korea, japan, singapore, israel, finland, poland, romania and greece don’t have, or procure, F-35
hardened hangars are a thing, and unlike magic drones, F-35s already exist
That is also why Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and several other countries aren’t planning to get any. Easier to let others have fighters, based in safer locations. Always possible to bring them forward to local air fields.
South Korea doesn’t have a rear area to rely on, even its capital is in artillery range from the north - it has no plan B except overcoming the opponent very fast (to decapitate a command chain, you need stealth strikes through their air defense).
Japan is an island far from the mainland - plenty of advance warning about an incoming ballistic payload. Poland has strategic depth like Ukraine. Greece doesn’t have that kind of a neigbour, but otherwise would qualify. Since it has very articulated landscape, it must optimize its ability for naval and air operations, so it needs good planes.
Romania and Finland are the countries in your list that fit my categories and make me think - maybe there is some benefit to a country with small strategic depth in having a very expensive air force.
In case of Finland, they have a large GDP per capita (enough to sustain an expensive project) and want their airforce to survive in range of the St. Petersburg air defense district of Russia (relatively densely armed). I think that, given the options (Jas-39 Gripen vs. F-35), they decided that “we must have an air force” and “nothing but a stealth air force will last in predictable conditions”.
In case of Romania, I keep wondering why they chose it. I think they simply added Ukraine to their strategic depth calculation and and concluded “we have plenty of strategic depth, there will be lots of advance warning if anyone comes at us over Ukraine”.
As for hardened hangars, the last ones over here (Estonia) to have them were the Soviets/Russians. Forward-deployed allied planes spend their time in lightly built above-ground hangars. I have no doubt in the planners knowing the state of the art. They simply aren’t that optimistic. There is every expectation that in case of war, planes cannot stay, but must temporarily retreat out of harm’s way. But you are correct to mention hardened shelters for planes, they should exist. But if one wants to keep operating in range of SRBM-s and attack drones - hardened everything, not just hardened hangars. (Sweden for example decided it wouldn’t have hardened everything, and designed a domestic fighter capable of flying off straight stretches of paved road.)
To summarize: if you foresee fighting in a phone booth, don’t choose a longsword. :)
Wrong, Czech republic signed contract for 24 F-35s almost a year ago.
in case of poland, you’re forgetting about ballistic missiles stationed in belarus and kaliningrad. in case of japan and to some degree south korea, there are also possible adversary’s naval assets
Is he doing this just to stay relevant?
You know, no publicity is bad publicity (in both meanings).
Why not criticise hospitals, roads, electric transport, burgers, breathing when he’s at it?
he might be doing this because he has no idea what he’s talking about
Or his PR team makes his twitter “say” this and that. Or both.
He fired his twitter account manager decade agk and has been increasingly more unhinged ever since
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.
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
Elon isn’t a citizen I thought. More of a foreign combatant I’d say.
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.
Wow, source please!
Thanks!
Edit: I hope he will have to not have any normal people around him any more, as its that easy to get 250.000$ out of him. What a piece of shit.
or like when he brained up hyperloop to prevent normal high speed trains development in california, but this one is too glaringly stupid and it’s going against thing that already is proven to work, and with no equals
That was the first time heard about Musk other than a few articles about him. And it was the moment I knew that he was an actual dumbass.
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.
But did you know it costs money?!
/s
I thought they ran on Freedom ^TM ?!
nope, it’s Element 710
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
Reliability is always being improved, they’re already on version 3 of the F-35. But no, “a lot more”, is a subjective term. There’s actually not much info on how often other jets break down. But they’re also on block 70, not block 4. And they’re still developing tools that fix them faster and better. For example the F-15 got an OBD scanner like device in 2007, after being in service for decades.
There’s actually not much info on how often other jets break down.
…what?
This is…one of the single biggest metrics people talk about in evaluation of military aircraft development projects?
Why has everyone temporarily lost their critical thinking skills in this thread?
Sure, go ahead and link me the stats for the F-15C/E, F-16E, and F/A-18 then. Specifically the mean time between critical failures? That’s break downs. There’s information on mission availability, which is in the 60’s percent like all of the other combat jets.
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”…
Yes. Indirectly or directly echoing ideas that have propogated through the military from Pierre Sprey and his allies in the “Fighter plane mafia.” Its genuinely hard to express what an undue influence these people have had on military thinking over the decades. These are the same people who convinced everyone that the Bradley (y’know, the one that has been fucking up tanks in Ukraine) is a bad vehicle.
“Can’t run, can’t climb, can’t fight” is the sort of thing you say when you’re under the impression that it’s still 1939 and we’re still using energy maneuver theory.
Dogfighting is as meaningful to modern combat as cavalry charges. The officers echoing this bullshit are no different than the ones who claimed that machine guns were overrated. Warfare has changed. Modern fighters operate like submarines; the goal is to detect and kill the enemy before they detect and kill you. Maneuverability has nothing to do with it.
As someone who has fought war…
You’re not right. You’re not even wrong.
Get back to me after you’ve at least done PLDC or BNOC.
I’m in Canada, we don’t have those. PLQ would probably be the closest equivalent up here.
Also PLDC is called WLC now. Sorry, I know it’s tough having to move with the times, but you really do have to try to keep up.
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?
From what I can tell it’s not that the airplane is unreliable, but the logistics and training for maintenance and repair haven’t been ironed out.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105341
The gao cites issues with the contractor not sharing technical details, lack of availability of parts, lack of training, etc.
That would make sense, I haven’t followed the F-35 for a while so maybe it’s gotten better since then. I still remember specifically reading that it malfunctions more often than it should, but I never dove deep into the subject and for all I know it could mainly be this. Ty for the link friend :3
“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.
it’s all “hey don’t do the thing that works, instead give money to meeee”
it’s rich coming from dude whose brainchild is cybertruck to say that F-35 sucks
Drones can be jammed. You cannot match a trained human pilot with an onboard AI pilot, as much as Mr Snake Oil would like you to believe. Imagine fighter jets with the piloting equivalent to the Tesla “FSD”.
Edit: here’s a paywall free mirror for the curious
he piloting equivalent to the Tesla “FSD”.
Seems perfect for suicide bombing drone. They are meant to crash after all.
it is also supposed to hit what it’s supposed to and not a random pedestrian
Not exactly fair to put the bar so much higher than most human operated US drone strike.
If the AI only hits a wedding every ten strike that would still be a massive improvement.
Yup, I’m sure that autonomous aircraft will eventually be able to fly better than humans, but that’s very far out. If musk wants to start funding it he can start selling stock and do it himself, don’t give him a dime of taxpayer money
overly expensive and poorly designed
Oh, like a flying cyber truck?
Count down until Musk throws a hissy-fit and calls Paul Livingston a “pedo”.
maybe he lost interest in F-35 because its first flight was 18 years ago
“We made waaaay too much money off that jet to be idiots!”
Regardless of what you think of the F-35, China stole the schematics and built their own.
But did they build a thousand of them to the same standard?
But then you miss out on guessing whether or not your weapons will fire in the middle of a vicious dogfight
No, they fixed the problems first :P
Lol those things definitely don’t work as well as intended.
Doesn’t the Chinese plane have twin engines?
I mean everybody is right by accident some of the time…
I love libs defending the f35 like the good warhawks they pretend to not to be.
Yes the f35 is a good fighter jet, if you ignore THAT IT COST 1.7 TRILLION and completely forget about the concept of lost opportunity cost.
Lol downvote me you fools the f35 was set in stone as strategic catastrophe before it ever entered combat by virtue of destroying an incomprehensible amount of our shared wealth. The f35 is a tool of the military industrial complex designed to suck up as much cash as possible, the functionality of the plane is a distant concern in practice which explains why it barely works even given the obscene amount of money spent on it.
F-15s cost 55-100 million depending on make and year. The F-35 is on the high end of that at 80-100 million but it is not outside the range of what we pay for aircraft. Furthermore Boeing’s Eagle upgrade the EX is actually more expensive than the F-35.
The only other option was to keep buying legacy aircraft. Which might work with Russia but the Chinese are actually figuring some stuff out.
…and the third option was a nextgen fighter development aircraft program that didn’t have horrific ballooning costs?
You mean inflation? Or the regular financial fear mongering? I can go back into the NYTimes Archives and find similar articles for the F-15, F-16, and F-18. Hell I’m old enough to remember the articles about the Super Hornet.
And now all of those planes are considered the gold standard. By the way, the F-15EX is literally just new F-15s with all of the updates applied, new engine, and stronger wings. Which strongly suggests this is just the cost of a new fighter jet in 2024.
The problem with the F-35 is their high maintenance cost and low reliability.
As it ever was with new military vehicles. Costs come down and reliability goes up over time. This isn’t the big deal Russia makes it out to be.
What does Russia have to do with anything? It’s the US military itself that has been having problems with it
Because this -
Aircraft that were combat-coded—which typically receive priority for spare parts and maintenance—achieved the best performance for availability, the report stated, noting that 61 percent were available on an average monthly basis. But that was still below the goal of 65 percent
Isn’t the horrible thing Russian propaganda makes it out to be. And every time people run around repeating their talking points they’re spreading misinformation crafted by Russia.
Another, less sensational way of stating it’s readiness would be, “Deployed F-35s were available for missions 94 percent of the time expected.”
Please explain how the cost overruns on the development program have any bearing on the effectiveness of the finished product?
Because anything you make with 1.7 trillion is going to look impressive unless you just throw all the money into barrels and just burn it?
Excluding the context of astronomical amounts of money like that is fundamentally disgenous to any accurate description of reality.
edit go on people, keep downvoting me to feel better because you don’t have an actual response, the jet looks cool and Musk is a pathetic loser with a billion dollars, but to admit the f35 is the same species of rot that the rise of oligarchs like Musk are an indicator of is too high a dose of reality for you :)
Hey I get your beef with the f35 but leave the national money hole out of it
The F-35 would be good if they hadn’t wasted so much time and energy and weight on having a pilot in it. On board pilots are a complete waste.
(Plus I bet dollars to doughnuts every F-35 we’ve sold to an “ally” has a secret switch somewhere to turn it into a drone.)
It would be impressive if it didn’t have a meat sack in it that needs climate control and fresh air and not to turn to hard…
there’s a reason the F-16 and F/A-18 are still the major US workhorses in the skies. (And of course my favorite the A-10 for blowing shit up on the ground.)
The A-10, good lord… 🤣
Why not bring back the p-51!
The Air Force just selected to use pilots in their NGAD fighter. Drones are not capable of standing up to humans yet. Especially in an electronic warfare situation where maintaining a communications link is not possible due to jamming. So the drone has to rely on on board tech for decision making. It would certainly be different if a super computer AI could control it over the communications link but that’s not where we are.
Edit to Add - The Air Force has more F-35As than they do all types of F-15, and about a 1:2 ratio of F-35 to F16. The F-35C had been slower to roll out but 100 have been delivered to the Navy and Marine Corps and the Corps is already using them in Yemen.
Also, as a former infantryman I love the A-10. But it’s time is done. The AF did it dirty and tried to cancel it a hundred times but it still did it’s job. But the F-35 is everything we asked for in a replacement except for grass stains on the fuselage. It carries a similar load, has a good loiter time, and benefits from more advanced precision technology so danger close is slightly more survivable.
And of course my favorite the A-10 for blowing shit up on the ground
Your favorite is the one famous for friendly fire?
Yeah, not surprising you’d hate the F-35 if you like that POS
The F-35 would be good if they hadn’t wasted so much time and energy and weight on having a pilot in it. On board pilots are a complete waste.
no, as a manned fighter the f35 is an embarassment of an arms development program independent of any discussion about the effectiveness of future manned vs. unmanned fighters. The program is a historic cost overrun and makes the litoral class of us navy ships look downright functional and frugal in comparison.
