Having the “free hand” from President Trump (until proven otherwise, of course), Elon Musk is now preparing to intervene in American defense and its armaments programs. As in his new message to X, commenting on the US Navy’s program to invest 40 billion dollars each year to build new ships and maintain existing ones (in a fleet that exceeds 350 vessels), he wrote the following:
“American weapons programs must be completely redesigned. The current strategy is to build a small number of weapons at high cost, to fight a “yesterday’s war”. If there is no immediate and dramatic change, the US will be crushed in the next war.”
American weapons programs need to be completely redone.
The current strategy is to build a small number of weapons at a high price to fight yesterday’s war.
Unless there are immediate and dramatic changes made, America will lose the next war very badly. https://t.co/wJfDROM7kz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2025
The “Maskish” aphorism is, however, simplistic. Because it may correctly state something general, but beyond that it cannot develop as analytical thought, but only as a sum of fantasies, promises and experimentation. As knowledge, experience, understanding of the object and its historical background are lacking, participation in practice in what many think is only a laboratory exercise. Even more so, Musk, but also his entourage of new-fangled technology tycoons, who have rallied behind and beside Trump, are plagued by this excessive self-confidence: that being successful in one field, they now “know everything” and that they can “find solutions everywhere”, which “the rest of the outdated ones cannot imagine”.
What does Musk state? How expensive are today’s weapons systems? Old is new and familiar, not today, but for decades now. How has war changed? But war as a practice, technique and technology is constantly changing and is itself the greatest school and testing ground for new weapons, doctrines and methods. How is American weapons (and not only American ones…) burdened by great bureaucracy, fragmentation, political interventions, corruption, outrageous costs and failures? And here he discovers the wheel and the fire together.
However, the idea – because this is hidden behind the Twitter aphorisms – that all this will be corrected by some “cutting of the Gordian knot” that will be invented by those who are not involved in defense issues, who understand the horrific reality of war through movies with Marvel heroes and video games, is dangerous. If you read what Musk’s followers are saying on social media these days (some of which he himself applauds), you will find the most fantastic and at the same time incoherent. Phrases like “throw everything away, only take drones”, ideas for recreating “Star Wars” with… new Death Stars, i.e. satellites that will launch thousands of smart weapons towards Earth, to references to “deadly lasers” and “cybernoi” that will annihilate the enemy without a bullet being fired.
The most likely thing to happen? Combine the arrogance of the various “Masks” with their successes in “I am the best gamer in such and such a video game” plus their excitement from far-right ideologies, with the military American bureaucracy, the speculation of large defense companies and political intervention within the USA, which wants “weapons factories in every state so that we can get a piece of the pie”, to create absolute chaos.
Meanwhile, China, which Trump sees as the “today’s great adversary” and builds dozens of warships a year and has launched 3 aircraft carriers in less than a decade, and equips an army of millions of soldiers, and produces hundreds of fighters a year, and practices cyberwarfare and equips and matures drones of all types. In a multi-layered equipment and design that is distinguished by intense pragmatism and serious funding. And without bigotry on X, Truth Social, Tik-Tok and Instagram.
