F-35 Update: More Money, Less Availability

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever built.  Total acquisition costs exceed $442 billion, 89.7 percent greater than the initial estimate of $233 billion, and total lifetime costs will exceed $2 trillion.

Despite these enormous outlays, the JSF fleet continues to suffer from lackluster readiness rates.  To turn the program around, the Department of Defense (DOD) came up with a predictable solution:  spend more money.   Pentagon planners launched the Global Support Solutions Reset initiative in 2025, which will spend $13.7 billion through fiscal year (FY) 2031 to ameliorate spare parts shortages and difficulties with maintenance, among other issues.

Thus far, the effort has failed to have an impact; in fact, readiness rates have continued to decline.  According to a June 11, 2026, Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, between FYs 2021 through 2025, the JSF fleet’s mission capable rate, which is the percent of time aircraft could perform one of its tasked missions, declined from 67 percent to 44 percent.  The JSF fleet’s full mission capable rate, the percent of time aircraft could perform all missions, dropped from 38 percent to 25 percent.

The F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) attempted to improve contractor performance by paying incentives totaling $114 million from 2020 to 2023, but the GAO found this funding had no impact.  According to the report, incentives “did not achieve F-35 readiness goals, due in part to JPO paying incentive fees for performance that did not align with service requirements.  Until JPO ensures the future use of incentives better achieves desired performance, it risks rewarding contractor performance that does not help meet program goals.”

None of these efforts will address the JSF program’s root problems, including the disastrous decision to run development and acquisition simultaneously.  When problems were identified or upgrades developed, contractors needed to make changes to aircraft that were already purchased, inflating costs and causing delays.  In addition, the nature of the contract the DOD reached for the JSF  undercut the result.  Under the deal, the contractor was solely responsible for the development and maintenance of many of the aircraft’s subsystems and retained control over technical data and intellectual property.

A September 21, 2023, GAO report determined that the DOD’s failure to negotiate access to data severely hamstrung efforts to maintain aircraft, adding to costs, delaying fixes, and contributing to woeful readiness rates.  The DOD became reliant on the often-overstretched capacity of the contractor to fix proprietary parts, and underperforming JSF subsystems could not be replaced with alternatives.  This created a “a perpetual monopoly,” according to former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

As it initiates substantial investment in the next generation of aircraft, it is vital for the DOD to draw key lessons from how it contributed to the underperformance of the JSF.  In the meantime, the Pentagon should scrap contractor incentives on a program that continues to move in the wrong direction.