Get your FREE .
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk tells a gathering of American fighter jet pilots that their era is over, and that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter needs some competition from a drone. He says the drone will beat the F-35. Bill Whittle — a licensed pilot and creator of the new podcast series “The Cold War: What We Saw” — thinks Musk is 73 percent right, and explains why.
Bill Whittle Now with Scott Ott is a production of our Members. Will you become one today?
Listen to , with Bill Whittle.
16 replies on “Elon Musk: Era of Fighter Jets Over, Replace F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with Drone”
Bill is correct about silicon: Computers run on bits, ones and zeros. Even quantum computers run on ones and zeros. That’s not a base for intelligence.
Humans run on concepts. A concept is an idea which doesn’t have any mass, no energy, no space or dimension, no location, etc. A life isn’t limited on the number of concepts it can have.
But a computer runs on ones and zeros, and will always be limited. Plus, life doesn’t work on two states, such as true/false, on/off, etc. Have you ever played the game where one person asks yes or no questions to discover something, and you can only answer yes or no? The game starts out with answers like, “Yes” and “No”, but then quickly devolves to “Well… kinda”.
This is because intelligence works on concepts, not binary bits.
It’s possible to program a computer to kick my ass at chess, but that doesn’t make it intelligent, and it never will be.
Michael Stackpole, in his Rogue Squadron books from the Star Wars universe had a situation where a bunch of pilots, new to the squadron, were being trained in flying as a group. One guy, Corran, one of the eventual main characters of the series and a good pilot, flew an obstical course and thought he had a good score (dodging simulated fire and shooting targets, IIRC) when he saw that the other pilots after him were beating his scores. He finds out that Wedge, the squadron leader, had a different lesson from that course than shooting targets. He had pulled the flight data from Corran’s X-wing and fed it to the other pilots so they could see where everything was. The lesson to Corran was that he was part of a group, not a solo hot shot pilot and to the rest that Wedge might order them through something difficult, and that Corran would be willing to do something they might not have the pilot skills to do (at least for a while) to make the whole group better.
Talking about the remote recon of our air assets and using the military as a complete entity brought that to mind. I think Bill has spoken about a similar “whole concept” before and the idea of using SEALS or Rangers on the ground, Air Force drones or planes in the sky, other air assets or subs farther back for ordinance delivery really doesn’t seem possible for the Chinese, no matter the size of the economy, if they cannot invade Taiwan because the army cannot get a ride from the Navy.
If that part is true, that is.
This is exactly the kind of fare that makes for great weekend posts! I know your schedule won’t permit it every weekend, so thank you, Scott!
I think an unmanned, carrier- based tanker would be pretty cool. Put some legs on that F35. Maybe go for a modular design where it can carry buddy stores or long range ordnance to be guided by data link.
Bill: Not to be pedantic (well, maybe a little), pilots wear G-suits, not anti-gravity suits.
Great show!
Just be thankful he said “suits” and not “strings”.
Would have been funny as he^^ if had said G-strings. Epic even.
Eww! There are very few pilots I would like to see in a G-string!
Bill, what do you think the consequences will be in this area when Starlink goes online? If you aren’t familiar with it, Starlink is a constellation of ~40,000 LEO sats that will provide very high bandwidth and very low latency internet worldwide that is being launched by SpaceX, who have already put a couple hundred of those sats into orbit. Hell, I’d like to see a BWN episode talking about what this constellation means in general and not just it’s military usage.
Starlink, while serving a valuable purpose, will put an end to ground based astronomy. Even with it’s limited present deployment it is already interfering with billion dollar telescopes by leaving light trails across their camera exposurers. This was not well thought out IMHO.
Early in my career we received a briefing from an F4 Phantom pilot who told us about a standing order they had regarding targets along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Intel had determined the NVA were supplementing their heavy truck losses by using couriers riding bicycles and carrying packs on their backs. If such targets of opportunity presented themselves, they were to be attacked. He was flying along the trail one day and spotted a guy pedaling his bicycle just as fast as he could. He winged over and came in low behind the bicyclist, armed his 20mm cannon, and lined up the sights. It was an easy kill, but at the last moment he switched the guns back to safe and buzzed Charlie instead (no doubt scaring the guy shitless). He shook his head and said he hadn’t been trained to fly a multi-million dollar jet fighter just so he could shoot some unarmed Gomer in the back. I’d like to see an AI operated drone make that call, but I know it won’t or can’t.
All these future Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ design, development, and production should have no offshore component. No H1Bs, either.
Wait a min, Bill. Last I heard was that the Air Force was unimpressed w/ the performance of Global Hawk. And after taking another look at it, found out it didn’t really have a job for Global Hawk. The Navy OTOH looked at it and saw an excellent maritime patrol (FUAC. Seriously, FUAC) aircraft. The Air Force isn’t buying any more than the small handful of Global Hawks they were committed to. But the Navy has put in an order for squadrons of Tritons (navalized Global Hawks).
We called it the Global Dork for its first few years of operation, but I retired in 07, so maybe it’s gotten better.
Do I want to know what FUAC stands for?
No.