Matt Yglesias

The Last Manned Fighter?

Mike Mullen thinks the F-35 may be the last manned fighter. Various stakeholders don’t like that idea, but Robert Farley thinks it’s right:

I guess I’m with Mullen; there are currently jobs that manned warplanes can do that drones can’t perform (human pilots are more visually capable than even the best drones, for example), but a) drones are getting better, b) drones are so much cheaper, and c)taking the pilot out means that you can do a lot of funky, interesting things with an advanced airframe. This isn’t to say that the F-35 (or even the F-22) have no role; they’ll continue to be useful frames for the jobs they’re intended to do for a substantial period of time. But I don’t think there’s a next “next generation” of fighter aircraft. And in any case, it appears that the A-10 will remain the platform of choice for fighting the giant robots that undoubtedly will afflict us in the future…

I’m with Farley on this. The point about cost savings is not totally intuitive and I don’t think it’s widely appreciated in the broader political/policy universe at this point but it’s extremely compelling. Given the long-term budget outlook it’s going to be really vital to start taking a real look at ways to get more bang for our defense buck and shifting to more reliance on unmanned aircraft is a very appealing way of accomplishing that goal. The cost differential is large enough that drones don’t need to be “as good” as human pilots before the fact that you could just have a bunch more of them starts to weigh more heavily.