Well, Elon is gone, but the lies still linger. Big bad Elon was going to cut spending by $2 trillion, remember? Actually, for a brief, shining moment, the Musk Man was talking some sense about government spending, suggesting, for example, that, since were’ livin’ in the age of drones, we call a halt to the Pentagon’s two trillion dollar pilot-killin’ baby, the “fifth generation” F-35 “Hanger Queen”, which the Pentagon plans to operate into the 2070s, despite the fact that, the U.S. Government Accountability Office told us in 2024, “Operating and support costs continue to rise despite the military planning to use the F-35 less”. And if you thought it ought to be the other way around, well, you sure don’t work for the Pentagon.
So, one up for Elon, right, for thinking “outside the box”, as we hipsters like to say, even going so far as to piss on the Pentagon’s beloved “stealth”, saying that “It is laughably easy to take down fighter jets. “Stealth” means nothing if you use elementary AI with low light sensitivity cameras. They aren’t invisible.” But that capacity for independent thought was so 2024. (Or maybe it was just the ketamine talkin'.) After a good soak in DC, old Elon kept his entire mouth shut about the “terrible” F-35 and kept it shut even when Trump announced that a brand new “sixth generation” fighter, the F-47, would be going into full production—an aircraft that, His Orangeness assured us, would be like the coolest thing ever—and also likely the most expensive, because back in 2024 under the Biden administration, the “design phase” of the F-47 was “paused” to figure out a way to rein in costs, which were shaping up to be triple that of the F-35 on a plane for plane basis (though we wouldn’t buy so many of them).
Well, now old Elon is gone, and so he won’t have to worry about yet another Trump/Pentagon Fraud, the “Golden Dome”, the successor in futility to Ronnie Reagan’s Star Wars, which would, Ronnie assured us, protect us from Soviet ICBMs “like a roof protects us from the rain”. Despite continuous testing, for decades, running up a bill of some $250 billion, the “program”, if one can call it such, never delivered a system remotely capable of taking out the rain of missiles that would occur during a real attack. And now Trump is proposing a “Golden Dome” that would cost $542 billion—even though it won’t work either. I call it an outrage but the Pentagon calls it “Tuesday”.
Poor Elon’s stock has fallen so far that “even” the National Review is trashing the DOGE man these days—see, for example, Mark Antonio Wright’s scornful (and accurate, as far as it goes) take, The Entirely Predictable Tragedy of DOGE, but Wright doesn’t go nearly far enough. Mark tells us that Elon diddled and fiddled with trivia and cut useful programs as well as two-bit (or $2 million) exercises in social justice posturing but left the big programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—entirely alone. And that’s true. But Musk also left defense alone, and even Mark couldn’t come up with the courage to tackle that one. Hey, Mark’s “conservative”! He’s not crazy!
Afterwords
It’s a good bet that F-47 won’t ever come to fruition—as in, you know, actually delivering planes that fly. In a classic instance of corporate welfare on a multi-billion dollar scale, the contract is being given to Boeing, easily the most fucked up defense contractor around. As Defense News puts it
But Boeing has struggled company-wide in recent years on both civilian and military aircraft. Nearly 350 people died in a pair of crashes of the company’s 737 Max airliners, and last July, the company agreed to a plea deal with the Justice Department to avoid a felony fraud trial related to the crashes. The door plug of another 737 Max blew out in midair in January 2024, and videos from the harrowing scene went viral. Boeing’s machinists also went on strike for nearly two months last year amid a contract dispute.
The aerospace giant’s T-7A Red Hawk trainer, KC-46A Pegasus tanker and Air Force One programs have struggled with quality problems and delays, and the company has lost billions of dollars in cost overruns. In September 2024, Boeing fired the head of its defense sector, Ted Colbert, amid steep losses.
But since Boeing has been having a hard time building commercial air liners that fly, they’re a natural for the F-47, which isn’t going to fly either.
