National Defense

Pentagon’s Trillion Dollar Fighter Jet Program Hasn’t Had Mission-Ready Plane In Six Years, Watchdog Says

Berend Verheijen/Unsplash

The Pentagon’s premier F-35 fighter jet program has fallen below mission-ready standards for six years, a government watchdog said on Monday.

The F-35 often costs close to $100 million per unit, and the Pentagon expects to spend roughly $2 trillion on the program over the coming decades. But even as one of the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons, all variations of the fighter jet have missed their mission-capable rate goal since fiscal year 2018, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Monday.

Mission capable rate goals are defined as “the percentage of total time when the aircraft can fly and perform at least one mission,” and are used to gauge the readiness of various military assets, according to the GAO report. There’s a variety of factors contributing to the F-35’s lackluster performance, many of which have been publicly reported, but the Pentagon still hasn’t taken some of the proper steps needed to address the problems.

“In September 2023, we reported that several maintenance challenges negatively affected F-35 readiness and the ability of the aircraft to achieve mission-capable goals,” the report reads.

Part of the problem stems from a lack of needed parts, lengthy maintenance backlogs and “challenges with depot and organizational maintenance,” according to the report. The Pentagon also heavily relies on defense contractors for the F-35 program — even though it doesn’t want to — but hasn’t taken any steps to try and take back control of the program.

The problems extend beyond the F-35. The one Air Force fighter jet variation, three Navy variations and two Marine variations all failed to meet their annual mission-capable goals over the last six years, according to the report. A number of the Air Force’s other fighter jet variations only met their goals in one of those years.

None of the military’s various fighter jet programs hit their mission-capable goals in all six years, according to the report.

Problems “include shortages of spare parts, unexpected replacement of parts and repairs, limited access to technical data for the aircraft, and shortages of trained maintenance personnel,” the report reads.

The F-35 program’s cost has ballooned since its inception. The Pentagon was set to spend just over a trillion dollars on the program in 2018, but those projections skyrocketed to approximately $1.5 trillion in 2023 and $2 trillion in 2024, according to GAO.

Those cost increases stem from the Pentagon’s failure to plan for the program, officials told Congress in late 2023.

“When you get to the root cause, some of the challenges that have emerged is because [DOD] didn’t have requirements [in place],” GAO director for contracting and national security acquisitions Jon Ludwigson told Congress in December.

The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Featured Image Media Credit:  Berend Verheijen/Unsplash)