The Secretary of the Air Force said Elon Musk ‘needs to learn more about business’ before mocking fighter jets.

• Frank Kendall, the Secretary of the Air Force, responded to Elon Musk’s comments criticizing the F-35.

• While Kendall said he respects the billionaire, he said Musk is “not a fighter.”

• Musk dismissed the F-35 as outdated compared to drones, but Kendall said the reality is decades away.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Elon Musk should learn more about anti-aircraft technology before he publicly slams commercial fighter jets as obsolete.

“I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer,” Kendall said Thursday at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“He’s not a fighter, and he needs to learn more about the business, I think, before he makes big announcements like he does,” Kendall said.

Musk recently drew public attention by posting on X that military fighters, such as the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, were inefficient compared to drones and had “shit design.”

Calling the makers of the F-35 “idiots,” Musk posted videos of drone strikes and wrote that the fighters would be easily shot down by modern surface-to-air missile defense systems and enemy drones.

Kendall, who oversees the US Air Force budget, said Musk’s drone supremacy vision is still years away.

“It’s annoying, it’s interesting,” he said of Musk’s statements. “I can think of another time; I don’t think it’s centuries, by the way; I think it’s more like decades when something like what he’s thinking can happen.”

“But we’re not there,” Kendall said. “And it will be a while before we get there.”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Kendall said he pushed the Air Force into a “significant decision” to stop drones working with the military.

However, he added that the US could eventually reduce its planned purchase of the F-35, a fifth-generation fighter made by Lockheed Martin, depending on how fast technological advances are.

“Our goal to establish the F-35 is 1,700 and more. I don’t know what we will end up buying, and no one can predict that yet,” said the secretary.

But he also doesn’t think the F-35 will be replaced anytime soon, and said the US is still buying some of the planes now and in the near future.

“It dominates over fourth-generation aircraft. Time. And in a very critical way. It’s not even close. And there’s no alternative to that in the near term,” he said.

The US has been looking for a sixth-generation fighter, also known as the next-generation air dominance system, which will focus on manned aircraft and drones.

Kendall said that if the NGAD plan goes ahead, it will take years to mass produce the fighter, and it will initially be “extremely expensive” to produce.

It is unclear how Musk’s views on the F-35 and drones might affect US defense spending. The billionaire has been made the head of a new Department of Government Efficiency, which aims to reduce what he sees as excessive corporate spending.

Musk is close to President-elect Donald Trump and showed this week that he can be a big influence in Congress when Republican lawmakers followed his lead in defeating a bipartisan bill that sought to avert a government shutdown.

Meanwhile, Kendall is expected to step down as Secretary of the Air Force when President Joe Biden, who nominated him, leaves office in January. The secretary expressed a desire in September to remain in his position as the Trump administration takes over.

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