Billionaire Elon Musk’s expected role on a federal commission on government efficiency is drawing extra attention in Arizona to his criticism of the F-35 fighter jet.
Lockheed Martin’s stock price dropped after Musk’s tweet Monday saying the F-35's design is “broken” and that manned fighter jets are obsolete.
“I understand Elon Musk's point that over time, drone and drone technology is going to be increasingly important, but the suggestion that we should eliminate the F-35 program and manned Air Force flights ... is wrong-headed,” U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton told ABC15 on Tuesday.
Luke Air Force Base in Glendale has trained U.S. fighter pilots for decades. The 56th Fighter Wing, which used to train F-16 pilots, is now focused on the F-35A Lightning II.
The base is an important driver of Arizona’s economy, according to Danny Seiden, CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce.
“It is our 11th largest employer in our state's nearly 20,000 jobs,” he said. “It's about a $4 billion economic impact on our economy.”
Musk, the owner of X and CEO of Tesla and Space X, is slated to co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency and has vowed to slash governmental spending.
The U.S. has been developing F-35s for 18 years, and the federal government now estimates the total cost of the program to be more than $2 trillion.
“We should always be looking at ways to save government money,” said Stanton, a Democrat who represents Congressional District 4 in Maricopa County. “We should always be looking at ways to do things more efficiently.”
The fighter jet program, he said, is critically important to both national security and Arizona.
"We don't want to be pennywise and pound foolish where we look for efficiency in ways that hurts national defense, and that's what I'm concerned about with the suggestion that we should eliminate the F-35 program,” Stanton said.
In his post on X, Musk said the F-35 "was required to be too many things to too many people."
"This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none," he posted. "Success was never in the set of possible outcomes."
Greg Williams, the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said Musk’s criticism of the F-35 design is spot on.
“This is an airplane that was designed to do a great many different things for three different military services that have rather different operating environments,” he said. “And like many things that are designed on the basis of compromise, it struggles to do well all of the things that it's trying to do.”
The jet requires frequent maintenance, he said and, according to government testing, doesn’t meet the Pentagon’s targets for mission readiness.
But Williams also said unmanned aircraft have limitations, especially when facing an enemy good at jamming electronic signals.
"I think that's an avenue that that's worth exploring, but it's not clear to me that that those technologies are any more mature than the approach that we're taking to the F-35," he said.
Williams also said it’s very difficult to stop programs like the F-35 once they’ve started. The jet was first manufactured in 2006, and the Pentagon finally authorized the F-35 for full-rate production earlier this year.
“Once you start employing thousands of people to make these things, it's a very difficult political decision to stop that funding and end that employment,” he said, adding that Trump has a very different approach to government and could defy expectations.
Meanwhile, Seiden said he doesn’t expect the F-35 program to go anywhere.
“President Donald Trump has shown a lot of support for the F-35 in the past,” he said. “We believe he'll show it again.”
