A few days ago the well known military expert Elon Musk opined that the F-35 was "obsolete" due to drones. Yesterday and today several papers are running with a story that Trump will cancel the program. Lockheed stock is down nearly 2% this morning and the rest of defense will also take a hit. The F-35 is in full rate production and is being purchased by several partner nations including Israel and most of NATO. There is not another fighter that can survive in the air against it unless perhaps a F-22. To date there are no operational fighter or fighter bomber drones. To cancel the program at this stage would be folly of an unimaginable scale on the belief that we can someday field a drone that can act as a fighter aircraft or fighter bomber. Meanwhile both China and Russia are fielding their first Gen 5 fighters which will outclass both the F-15 and F-16. Madness if true.
One of my worries about DOGE is its inability to actually affect structural change in any meaningful way or to touch the 3/4's of the budget dedicated to entitlement. Everyone inevitably is forced to turn to defense. Killing programs is always the one easy budget cut that can be made.
The B2 bomber is a good example. Billions go into research and development to create the aircraft over a decade, and just as it is going into production, the program is truncated to just 21 aircraft instead of the planned 132. Guess what that did to the cost per aircraft. Yet, those 21 have played a key role in every major airstrike carried in contested airspace for twenty years. None has ever been intercepted - likely never even acquired. But because we have so few, F-16's and F-17's have been used on deep penetration strikes for which they were not designed.
Another example is the Crusader artillery system. The first low rate production assemblies were being fabricated and the actual production plant was breaking ground in Oklahoma, when a brand new SECDEF, Donald Rumsfeld, decided to make a point that the country did not need to waste money on artillery when air power could provide all needed fire support. Within two years, that ignorant decision was costing lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US army is still operating a system that was first fielded in the fifties.
Tesla and Space X’s Elon Musk is tasked with slashing federal spending as a co-leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency in Trump’s incoming...
www.dallasnews.com
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/worl...with-lockheed-martin-what-we-know/ar-AA1vHBV5
‘“I think that the biggest threat we’ve ever had to the plant exists now,’ said one North Texas federal lawmaker.
news.yahoo.com
Lockheed has responded that it is fake news.