F-35 Readiness Collapses as Pentagon Spends $1.6 Trillion

Why It Matters

The F-35 is the Department of Defense's most costly weapon system, and it is failing to deliver on its promises. The F-35 Mission Capable Rate declined from 67 percent in fiscal year 2021 to 44 percent in fiscal year 2025, while the Full Mission Capable Rate fell from 38 percent to 25 percent over the same period. These numbers represent a fundamental problem: fewer aircraft are ready to fly and fight when needed.

The stakes are enormous. Lifetime sustainment costs for the United States alone are estimated at $1.6 trillion as of 2024, with no end in sight. The Department of Defense (DoD) currently operates and sustains over 800 U.S. F-35s and plans to buy approximately 1,700 more aircraft by the mid-2040s. By the mid-2030s, U.S. military services will annually face a more than $1 billion gap between projected F-35 sustainment costs and their affordability goals.

In response to this deteriorating readiness crisis, the DoD launched a new F-35 readiness strategy in 2025 called the Global Support Solution Reset. But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has raised serious concerns about whether this strategy will succeed, and whether the Pentagon is making smart decisions about how to spend taxpayer money on this troubled program.

The Broader Context

The Mission Capable Rate measures the percentage of aircraft available for operations, while the Full Mission Capable Rate measures aircraft ready to perform their full range of assigned missions.

A lack of spare parts is a primary culprit. The F-35 Joint Program Office will be reliant on the private sector to deliver more than $7 billion in additional parts and other materials. Capacity constraints persist for key F-35 parts, limiting how quickly the Pentagon can repair and maintain its fleet.

The DoD has become dependent on private companies to keep the F-35 flying, creating vulnerabilities and cost pressures that are difficult to control.

In 2025, the DoD launched the Global Support Solution Reset to address these challenges. The strategy requires an estimated $13.7 billion more than previously planned through fiscal year 2031. The aim is to improve F-35 readiness by 2030.

The strategy targets the core problems, but the GAO analysis raises red flags about whether the Pentagon has learned from past mistakes or is simply repeating them.

The Pentagon has tried to solve the F-35 readiness problem before by paying its contractor hundreds of millions of dollars in incentive fees since 2020 to improve F-35 readiness. These fees were supposed to align contractor interests with Pentagon goals, creating financial rewards for hitting performance targets, but that failed.

What the GAO Found

The GAO published its F-35 sustainment report on June 11, following a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 to conduct an annual review of F-35 sustainment efforts.

The GAO made exactly three recommendations, all directed to the DoD. The first calls for the Secretary of Defense to ensure the F-35 Program Executive Officer proactively develops risk mitigation plans for the Global Support Solution Reset. Multiple issues could threaten the success of the strategy, and the Pentagon needs to identify and prepare for those risks.

The second recommendation calls for the Secretary of Defense to ensure future incentive approaches better achieve desired performance for F-35 sustainment contracts. The Pentagon must learn from its past failures with contractor incentives and design better approaches.

The third recommendation calls for the Secretary of Defense to ensure the development and implementation of a system with quality control safeguards for incentive fee metrics and payment information. The Pentagon needs better oversight of how incentive fees are calculated and paid.

The DoD concurred with all three recommendations. All three are currently open, meaning implementation is underway or pending.

The Bottom Line

Even with the new F-35 readiness strategy, the Pentagon faces a looming affordability crisis. Sustainment costs continue to increase, and the military services' budgets are not keeping pace.

By the mid-2030s, the annual gap between what the F-35 program will cost to sustain and what military services can afford to spend will exceed $1 billion. This gap will force difficult choices: spending less on other defense priorities, accepting lower readiness rates, or seeking additional budget authority.

The Global Support Solution Reset is intended to bend the cost curve, but the GAO's analysis suggests the Pentagon has not yet solved the fundamental problem of how to sustain this weapon system affordably over the long term.

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