An Environmental & Budgetary Defense Of The F-35 – CleanTechnica

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In recent posts to his social media site, Elon Musk took aim at a tough target: the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II. Not only is it stealthy (something Musk claims to have a workaround for), but he also thinks it’s a monetary boondoggle that his unofficial “government agency” should try to get rid of to save the taxpayers money. In this article, I want to explain why he’s not only wrong about the money and the future of fighter jets, but that he’s also risking a program with real environmental benefits.

Let’s Start With The Fuel Savings & Emissions Reductions

I know it probably sounds not only silly, but flat-out idiotic, to claim that a fighter jet can have a positive environmental impact. After all, fighter jets are among the least efficient vehicles in existence. When it comes to how much fuel they burn, they make the least efficient brodozer pickup trucks look like a bicycle. We’d all be better off if we could achieve world peace, ground them all, and sing Kumbaya or whatever. Jets bad, amirite?

But, given their essential role in securing freedom and safety in democratic countries, they’re not something we can just do without to save the environment, at least not in the real world. There’s always some autocratic regime, wicked authoritarian religious or political philosophy, or terror group out there stirring up trouble and making it necessary for free countries to defend themselves. I know that’s a vast simplification, as free-er countries aren’t always as free as they should be, stir up some of the problems themselves, and could probably do better at diplomacy, but all in all, we can’t just ditch fighter jets.

This having been said, their terrible contributions to greenhouse gas emissions aren’t something that can’t improve, and the insane amounts of money they cost isn’t something we can’t do better on. That’s exactly what the F-35 achieves.

According to Defense One, the F-35 uses vastly less fuel than similar older jet aircraft. On a hypothetical trip from Guam to Taiwan during a conflict over the country, 18 F-15EX fighters (a vastly-improved version of the aging F-15 fighter) would burn about 491,000 gallons of fuel, including fuel needed to bring more fuel on tankers. F-35s running the same mission would consume far less fuel and require fewer tankers for refueling, totaling about 253,000 gallons of fuel.

In other words, the F-35 uses just over half of the fuel that alternative fighters would use. Saving 238,000 gallons of fuel is no laughing matter, either. When you consider that the average vehicle on the road today will use about 2,693 gallons of fuel during its lifetime, that means that for just this one mission, as much fuel is saved as would be switching 88 vehicles out for EVs. And that’s just for one mission!

But, Isn’t The F-35 Program Troubled and Way Too Expensive?

If you believe many media reports, you’d think that the F-35 is a terrible fighter jet. It’s bad at fighting other planes, it’s got serious flaws and crashes a LOT, and it’s a financially-troubled program that’s wasting vast amounts of taxpayer money to deliver that awful performance.

But … that couldn’t be further from the truth!

I won’t spend a bunch of time on this issue, but in short, it’s a problem of “If it bleeds, it leads.” When bad things happen, media outlets are all over it because it’s interesting enough to get eyeballs and clicks, and those eyeballs and clicks are essential to making a living in the business. But, the good things, how things have changed since past reports, and deeper truths are something readers and viewers yawn at.

On top of media biases toward bad news, there’s also the problem of Russian and Chinese disinformation. If the United States has a great program doing good things for its military, you can bet that those countries would have an interest in trying to get that program shut down. After all, their programs are truly troubled, and they simply can’t compete with the F-35, the older but more maneuverable F-22, and many other American systems. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

The truth is that the program has overcome initial problems (like all past jet programs that were troubled in the beginning). The cost per plane is cheaper than the F-15EX and falling, making it a great deal compared to just about anything in production today. Its safety record is fantastic when you consider that well over 1,000 planes have been built, making the losses lower than most other planes. It can also greatly outperform the best planes Russia and China have to offer.

It’s a successful program by any measure and it’s only improving with time! It’s not a failure.

Why Not Just Switch To Drones To Save Even More Fuel and Money?

One other thing Musk claims is that it would be more cost effective to just replace the F-35 with drones. Unmanned platforms should be cheaper, less risky for people on our side flying them, and could likely use even less fuel than the F-35. But, once again, that’s just not a good position to take.

The cold, hard fact is that building rockets (even very great rockets) doesn’t give one a familiarity with fighting wars. It would be foolish to deny that Elon Musk is a genius, and is capable of doing great thinking, but just as with computers, the best computer’s outputs will only be as good as its inputs. It’s the old “garbage in, garbage out,” mixed with a bit of “stay in your lane.” Musk understands technology, but he doesn’t understand tactics the way military planners who chose the F-35 do.

While drones are impressive and can do unprecedented things, drones are a very different tool for a very different job. Drones have a real future in the military space, but they can’t be at their most effective without someone ordering them around. The F-35 has been designed to act as a quarterback in the sky, helping give the human in the loop unprecedented amounts of valuable information to make better decisions. This information will enable F-35 pilots to effectively work with whole groups of “loyal wingman” drones.

In other words, the F-35 was built to work in concert with drones! Eliminating it in favor of drones would make almost zero sense, especially if you’re optimistic about the future of autonomous drone technology. The F-35 is built to be a great manned platform in the short term while being ready for far more drones in the long term as they become better. The plane is a bit like a Tesla in that it’s a decent car that will become better when unsupervised FSD becomes a reality.

It’s not a question of drones vs. fighters. It’s a question of drones AND fighters.

Developing a new drone fighter to replace the F-35’s role in such a kill web wouldn’t be cheaper to operate, either. You’d be starting from scratch developing a new fighter, taking on all of the development costs and risks that the F-35 overcame in its earlier years. It would take some time to get to the point where that program’s costs dropped down to the costs that the F-35 has achieved and becomes a truly good option financially to replace it.

Fighter jets are also doing a lot more than simply carrying missiles into combat. Fighter pilots do a lot more than that, and have to make a lot of important decisions with incomplete information. Plans need to change mid-flight in many cases, and AI will choke on dealing with decisions outside of training for some time now. It’s an issue that AI systems might never really be able to fully overcome, per AI experts, because AI models aren’t great at determining whether data is relevant to the task at hand. This is something our ventromedial prefrontal cortex is already extremely good at.

Advanced air defense systems and the use of AI and cameras simply aren’t able to harm jets the way Elon Musk claims. Systems like the F-35 don’t work to simply fly right in as if invisible and defeat these systems through sheer technological superiority. A wealth of experience operating stealth aircraft and using them effectively against radar systems also comes into play, and that’s not something that autonomous aircraft can just do on their own yet.

Final Thoughts

On top of all of the above, we can’t forget that Musk has had private conversations with Vladimir Putin, gets special favors from the Chinese government at Tesla, and has ties to people and organizations that have been caught again and again working against America’s interests because they’re on the Russian payroll. When he falsely says that the F-35 is a bad and/or obsolete program, we have to keep that background in mind. Even giving him the full benefit of the doubt and assuming he’s not in the bag for foreign interests, we know that he’s getting a lot of information from people who are closer to Putin and Xi.

It’s also important to keep in mind that, at least in military planning, ideas are only really valuable when you can take action on them. Even with Elon Musk being a very smart person, general ideas like switching to autonomous drones sound good, and reflect the likely future trajectory of warfare, but they aren’t useful without an actual plan for getting there from where we are today. The F-35 is part of an actual plan to get there from here, and we have to keep going down that path until a realistic alternative is ready to replace it.

Featured image by the Cynthia Griggs, U.S. Air Force (Public Domain, Government Work). Use of DoD imagery does not imply endorsement.