Billionaire Elon Musk, nominated by Donald Trump to head a committee to cut US federal spending, today pushed back against the use of modern fighter jets, saying drones represent the future of conflict. in the ethers.

“Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones. With only the death of the pilots,” said the president of SpaceX and Tesla in a post on his own X platform.

Elon Musk was particularly opposed to the use of F-35 of the American company Lockheed Martin, which has been considered the flagship of the US Air Force since it entered service in 2015.

“Meanwhile, you have idiots still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,” he said on Sunday, posting a video showing hundreds of drones in formation a few tens of meters high.

The F-35, the so-called fifth-generation stealth aircraft, was recently the product for which sales contracts were signed to Romania, Poland, Germany.

Its critics often cite its highly complex construction, mainly due to the design of the IT programs, and its very high operating costs.

“The design of the F-35 failed in terms of requirements, asking it to be too many things to too many people,” Elon Musk said today, for whom the F-35 has become a “complicated and expensive” machine with no specialty in battle.

However, for Mauro Gilli, a researcher at the Federal University of Technology Zurich (ETH), “what makes the F-35 expensive is its software and electronics, not the pilot.”

“This is important as a reusable drone would need all the impressive electronics of the F-35,” wrote the X-Platform researcher.

He also points out that the existence of a program with such advanced technologies as the F-35 forces the United States’ adversaries to launch programs to respond to it, mainly advanced radars.

“By their very existence, the F-35 and B-1 are forcing Russia and China to make strategic choices that they otherwise wouldn’t have to make (ie have fiscal resources),” according to Gilli.

“Even if Musk was right (and he is wrong), scrapping these programs could loosen restrictions” on those adversaries of the United States, he added.