Billionaire Elon Musk urges US to add hypersonic missiles, UAVs

Washington [US], December 28: Billionaire Elon Musk asserts that the US needs a large stockpile of hypersonic missiles and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air and at sea.
"The US needs a large number of long-range UAVs (in the air, on the water and under the ocean) and hypersonic missiles. Anything manned will die very quickly in a UAV engagement," according to Fox News, citing billionaire Elon Musk's post on the X platform on December 26.Previously, Mr. Musk also said: "Future wars will all involve UAVs and hypersonic missiles. Human-piloted fighter jets will be destroyed very quickly."
Mr Musk said some US weapons systems were good, but they were too expensive. "We are ending the worst value-added military program in history, the F-35 program ," Mr Musk said.
"The F-35 design is broken at the standards level, because it requires too many steps for too many people. This makes it a complex and expensive tool. It can do everything, but it can do nothing well. Success is never about the set of possible outcomes. And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of UAVs anyway. It will only kill pilots," Musk said in a post in November.
Commenting on the world's richest billionaire , US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that Mr. Elon Musk needs to learn more about air combat technology before publicly criticizing that manned fighter jets are outdated.
"I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer. However, he is not a military man, and I think he needs to learn a little more about the field before making such big statements," said Mr. Kendall.
President-elect Donald Trump announced that billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Government Performance Council. Musk has repeatedly warned about the country's wasteful spending. The national debt has now surpassed $36.1 trillion. "Either we fix this or we go bankrupt," Musk said.
Source: Thanh Nien Newspaper