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- Marc Andreessen says that AI-controlled jets are “far superior” to their crewed counterparts.
- Drones, he said, can move much faster because they don’t have to carry a person.
- Andreessen’s comments echo that of Elon Musk, who said this week that he thinks crewed fighter jets are inefficient.
Elon Musk isn’t the only tech executive who thinks drones are way better than fighter jets.
Marc Andreessen, a cofounder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, made a similar comment during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience that aired Tuesday.
AI-controlled jets, Andreessen told Rogan, are “far superior” to fighter jets that need pilots.
“And there’s a bunch of reasons for that. And part of it is just simply the speed of processing and so forth,” Andreessen said.
“But another big thing is if you don’t have a human in the plane, you don’t have the, as they say, the spam in the can, you don’t have the human body in the plane,” the venture capitalist continued.
“You don’t have to keep a human being alive, which means you can be a lot faster, and you can move a lot more quickly,” he added.
Representatives for Andreessen at Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Musk has been weighing in on the F35 fighter jet while advocating for drone warfare
Andreessen’s comments to Rogan echo Musk’s, who criticized the Pentagon’s F-35 program in a series of X posts on Sunday.
“Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs. A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot,” Musk wrote in one of his posts.
Musk continued to comment on fighter jets on Tuesday, making an X post responding to Andreessen’s interview with Rogan.
“Future wars are all about drones & hypersonic missiles. Fighter jets piloted by humans will be destroyed very quickly,” Musk wrote on Tuesday.
In the meantime, Silicon Valley has become increasingly interested in disrupting the defense sector.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he was a “licensed arms dealer” during a lecture he gave at Stanford University in April.
Schmidt said this was because he was working with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun to mass-produce drones for Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia.
Then, in August, startup accelerator Y Combinator said it was backing its first weapons startup, Ares Industries. The company said it wants to make smaller and cheaper anti-ship cruise missiles.
Musk’s remarks on the F-35 have taken on a heightened significance given his recent appointment as the co-lead of President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Musk hasn’t specified any cost cutting plans for the F-35 program. However, he did reference the Defense Department’s $841 billion budget in an op-ed he wrote with his DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
“The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent,” the pair wrote.
Drones have been game-changing in modern warfare, but military experts say there are still advantages to having manned fighter jets over drones.
Justin Bronk, a Royal United Services Institute airpower analyst, told BI that a human pilot’s flexibility is “very difficult to replicate in an automatic system.”
The viability of drone technology also needs to be weighed against the F-35’s extensive bombing, surveillance, battle management, and communications capabilities. On that front, uncrewed aircraft are “simply not there,” Mark Gunzinger, a retired US Air Force pilot and the director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told BI.
When approached for comment, a Pentagon spokesperson told BI on Monday that the US’s combat-capable aircraft “perform exceptionally well against the threat for which they were designed.”
“Pilots continually emphasize that this is the fighter they want to take to war if called upon,” the spokesperson said.
