While top Trump advisor Elon Musk has suggested a near-term end to manned fighter aircraft, such as the F-35, and their replacement by artificial intelligence-enabled drones, former and current DoD officials have said that is unrealistic and that unmanned combat fleets are not ready for prime time.
The U.S. Air Force is the military service that is perhaps the farthest down the unmanned road under Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s more than two-year Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) effort.
“I was a little unsure as to how our operators would react to this [CCA], but when I asked them the question, ‘How do you feel about this?,’ they said, ‘Sir, these are gonna keep us alive,'” Kendall told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies virtual forum on Thursday.
The Air Force has said that it envisions CCAs working in concert with advanced, manned platforms, such as the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35A and possibly the Boeing [BA] F-15EX and/or a manned, sixth generation Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter.
“I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer,” Kendall said on Thursday of Musk’s recent comments on the F-35 and manned fighter aircraft. “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 [sic] that he did. It’s provocative. It’s interesting. I can imagine at some point–decades– when something like he imagines can occur, but we’re not there, and it’s gonna be a little while before we get there.”
Musk has never received an engineering degree.
Asked whether the Air Force could stop the F-35A buy and increase funding significantly for CCA instead, Kendall replied, “The F-35 isn’t going away.”
“It’s a state-of-the art system that’s continuously being upgraded,” he said. “There’s a reason so many countries are buying the F-35. It is dominant over 4th generation aircraft, period, in a very serious way. It’s not even close, and there is no alternative to that in the near-term. If we do continue with NGAD, it’s gonna be several years before we start to field them in quantity, and it’s gonna be a very expensive airplane compared to F-35.”
Kendall said that the F-35 contractor could do better, including on costs.
“We should continue to buy it,” Kendall said. “We need better performance out of Lockheed, quite honestly. They haven’t been delivering what they’ve been promising, and they’re not doing it as fast as they could by a wide margin.” He added that we did drive the [F-35] cost down over the first 15 or so years. I spent a lot of time on that when I was AT&L [Acquisition and Technology chief from May 2012 until January 2017]…We’re not driving costs down as much as we were. I think more effort needs to be put to that.”
The Air Force plan has been to buy 1,763 F-35As, and, while the service may need to reconsider that number in light of CCA and manned NGAD, if it continues, “I don’t think we’re ready to do that [review of F-35 buy numbers] yet,” Kendall said.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the head of the Mitchell Institute, said that “we just saw U.S.-produced F-35s employed by Israel penetrate into the heart of Iran and, not just avoid the Russian most advanced surface-to-air missile [SAM] systems, but destroy them and return safely with no losses.”
“There are no drones today that can do that,” he said.
On Oct. 26, more than 100 Israeli aircraft, including F-35s, destroyed Iranian defense production sites and military equipment, including S-300 SAMs, officials have said.