Musk has called for the United States to replace warplanes with drones

Us billionaire Elon Musk has slammed modern fighter jets as "obsolete" and called drones the future of air combat.

Musk, the founder of SpaceX and electric car company Tesla and owner of social media platform X, has been tasked by US President-elect Donald Trump with cutting federal spending, along with entrepreneur Ramaswamy.

"In the drone age, manned fighter aircraft are obsolete and will only kill the pilot," Musk wrote on X on Monday.

He also singled out for criticism the F-35 fighter jet, a next-generation fighter built by Lockheed Martin that entered service in 2015.

Musk posted a video of hundreds of drones hovering in the sky and wrote: "There are still idiots making manned fighter jets like the F-35."

The F-35 is the world's most advanced fighter jet with stealth capabilities and can also be used to gather intelligence. However, the development of the F-35 has also encountered some problems, especially with regard to computing programs, and its very high operating costs have been criticized.

Germany, Poland, Finland and Romania have all recently signed agreements to order F-35s.

"The F-35 design is flawed at the demand level because it needs to satisfy so many people," Musk said. He called the F-35 "an expensive and complex generalist that turns out to be nothing."

In response, Mauro Gilli, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said that the key to the F-35's high price is its software and electronics, not the pilot itself.

"A reusable drone needs all the cool electronics of the F-35," Geely said.

He also said the F-35's existence forced U.S. competitors to develop their own aircraft and advanced radars to match it. "Because of the F-35 and B-1 bombers, Russia and China have had to make strategic choices [meaning budget allocations] that they didn't have to make."

"Even if Musk is right (and he is wrong), abandoning these programmes [the F-35] would lift the constraints we have placed on them [Russia and China]," Mr Gilley said.