WASHINGTON — An absence of spare parts and technical data, poor training of maintainers, and a lagging effort to expand repair depots are dragging down the U.S. military’s ability to maintain the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter within the air, a government watchdog said in a report released Thursday.
And the issues hindering the military from taking on more sustainment activities from the prime F-35 contractor, Lockheed Martin, will cost the federal government billions of dollars annually if a cheaper strategy isn’t found, the Government Accountability Office wrote in its report.
The F-35 and its advanced capabilities make it a formidable weapon in the USA’ arsenal, GAO said. But when the plane can’t get off the bottom due to problems with its maintenance and sustainment, the report added, that “invaluable edge” does the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps no good.
The three services combined have greater than 450 F-35s, and the Defense Department eventually plans to purchase a complete of just about 2,500 fighters with a life-cycle cost of greater than $1.7 trillion.
The overwhelming majority of that life-cycle cost, $1.3 trillion, comes from the operation and sustainment of the jet, GAO said.
However the F-35′s availability has lagged for years, and if a war broke out today, many fighters could be unavailable to fight. In March 2023, GAO said, the mission-capable rate for all F-35s was at 55%. That’s well below the 70% mission-capable goal the Air Force has for its F-35As, and the 75% goal for the Navy and Marine Corps’ F-35B and F-35C variants.
Key lawmakers and watchdog groups have repeatedly criticized the military and Lockheed Martin for failing to enhance the F-35′s availability. Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, who directs the F-35 program, has launched an effort he calls the “war on readiness” to repair the difficulty, although public details remain scarce.
GAO’s latest report presents a deep dive into the various issues that mix to pull down F-35 availability — particularly in obtaining parts to repair broken jets.
The Pentagon agreed with GAO’s recommendations to reconsider its sustainment approaches to the F-35; determine whether the federal government should take over more responsibilities; consider whether changes to the Navy and Air Force are obligatory to higher sustain the jet; determine what technical data the services must support any changes to maintenance processes; and discover what resources is perhaps obligatory.
In an announcement from the F-35 Joint Program Office, Schmidt said this system continues to work on a “more resilient sustainment structure” and grow its capability and efficiency worldwide. This includes standing up a network for repair, transportation and warehousing faster, and using incentives to industry to make more F-35s available at an inexpensive cost.
Lockheed Martin said in an announcement to Defense News it’s able to work with the federal government because it plans for the long run of the F-35′s sustainment. The corporate added it has long worked with the federal government to repair the problems that degrade F-35 readiness through its reliability and maintenance program.
A spare parts conundrum
The backlog of broken spare parts that need fixed has greater than doubled since spring 2019, GAO said, from 4,300 to greater than 10,000.
It now takes a median of 141 days to repair a broken spare part — far above the F-35 program’s goal of 60 days — and nearly three-quarters of those parts are sent back to the unique equipment manufacturer for repair.
Quite than wait nearly five months for a repaired part, GAO said the F-35 Joint Program Office often buys latest parts at the next cost. This helps get the fighter back within the air faster, GAO acknowledged, however it drives up sustainment costs.
Pentagon officials don’t think it’s a sustainable strategy.
Program officials told GAO that military service depots can repair parts more quickly than the unique manufacturer, in about 72 days on average. The parts that the majority steadily result in an F-35 being unable to perform its mission include its cover, engine, distributed aperture system sensor and nacelle vent fan.
But this system’s habit of shopping for latest parts as a substitute of fixing broken ones is siphoning money that would go to establishing repair activities at six depots. Moreover, the F-35 program has fallen 12 years behind schedule in establishing those activities, GAO said, partly due to inadequate funding because the military focuses more on buying latest jets than on sustaining existing ones.
The military is now in a position to repair 44 of the 68 components at F-35 depots including Ogden Air Logistics Complex at Hill Air Force Base in Utah in addition to the Fleet Readiness Center East at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina. Parts that depots will give you the option to repair include the fighter’s landing gear, ejection seat and power thermal management system.
Nonetheless, the depots shall be unable to repair all parts until 2027, the Pentagon projects. These delays have led to slow repair times, lower readiness and a growing backlog of broken parts.
An absence of spare parts was a major problem for 10 of 15 F-35 installations the GAO surveyed, and last yr fighters were unable to operate about 27% of the time because a spare part was unavailable.
Maintainers told GAO they often can’t do their jobs because they don’t have enough parts or don’t know when they’ll receive spares. The maintainers identified Lockheed Martin’s supply chain process because the cause.
The report singled out the F-35′s distributed aperture system sensor for instance of a problematic part. This sensor, made by RTX subsidiary Raytheon, provides 360-degree situational awareness and is meant to permit an F-35 pilot to detect potential threats, equivalent to missiles.
One installation has resorted to “workarounds” to maintain F-35s flying with broken sensors once they’re waiting for alternative parts to be delivered, GAO said, but this degrades the jet’s ability to totally perform its mission.
The F-35 Joint Program Office told GAO it’s on the lookout for ways to repair the spare parts issue, including potentially getting into a performance-based logistics contract with Lockheed Martin. But buying enough spare parts and supplies to have each installation fully stocked could be too expensive, officials told the watchdog.
F-35 installations also often lack enough support equipment on the flight line, including equipment needed to offer the jet with electric or hydraulic power, or to tow it.
At some installations, it is not uncommon practice for squadrons to borrow support equipment from other squadrons. But when an F-35 squadron deploys and takes many of the installation’s support equipment, that leaves the remaining squadrons “scrambling” to seek out equipment to take care of the remaining jets.
That support equipment steadily breaks, GAO said, and since it’s proprietary, contractors must are available in to repair it — a process that may take months.
In the previous couple of years, the F-35 program has grown to conclude it may possibly’t afford the present strategy of contractor-led sustainment of the jet. By 2036, GAO wrote in a 2021 report, contractor-led sustainment of the jet shall be $6 billion greater than the military can afford in that yr alone.
Haunted by ‘acquisition malpractice’
Decisions made on the dawn of the F-35 are also coming back to haunt it — particularly the Pentagon’s early decision not to acquire technical data on the fighter from Lockheed Martin, and the considerable amount of concurrency in this system.
Concurrency refers to when a program’s development, testing, production and fielding phases overlap. Within the case of the F-35 program, the jet has continued to undergo testing and refinement for greater than a decade after the primary lot was built and delivered to the U.S. military and international customers.
The F-35 is now in its fifteenth production lot, and GAO said aircraft as recent as lot 12 required repairs and modifications after testing showed major changes were obligatory.
There at the moment are at the least 14 different versions of the F-35 undergoing work at depots, officials at several locations told GAO.
When jets must receive modifications, the work further strains depots’ ability to conduct day-to-day repairs. Depot officials told GAO upgrading these jets takes 1000’s of workload hours apiece and requires F-35s to remain in depots for an prolonged period.
Without obligatory and complete technical data from Lockheed Martin and its subcontractors, repair times have lagged. When the F-35 program began, GAO said, the Pentagon thought it will be cheaper to have contractors handle the majority of the jet’s sustainment. In consequence, the Pentagon didn’t require Lockheed at hand over the technical data that might allow the military to “organically” handle maintenance itself.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has repeatedly criticized that call, earlier this yr calling it “a serious mistake” the service won’t repeat on its sixth-generation Next Generation Air Dominance fighter.
The acquisition philosophy in vogue on the time of the F-35 program’s launch twenty years ago, dubbed Total System Performance, meant the contractor on this system would own it for the system’s entire life cycle, Kendall said during a May breakfast with reporters.
This creates “a perpetual monopoly,” Kendall explained, and amounts to “acquisition malpractice” on the F-35.
Officials at an unidentified depot told GAO that maintenance manuals for some key parts are “ambiguous and infrequently are detailed enough for depot personnel to make the repair.”
“In consequence, depot personnel not only cannot fix the part, but they can not learn and understand the way to fix the part,” the watchdog wrote.
That is proving to be a selected problem because the military tries so as to add a software maintenance repair component to depots. Lockheed Martin and its subcontractors wrote the fighters greater than 8 million lines of code, and so they handle the management of and repairs for this code.
The federal government’s F-35 program has desired to take over this sustainment for greater than five years, and the military has long done the identical work on other aircraft. But this system’s inability to amass the source code obligatory to sustain the F-35′s software has prevented it from taking on that work.
In its statement to Defense News, Lockheed Martin said it delivers all data to the federal government required under its contracts “and is committed to providing data for the Department of Defense to sustain the aircraft under applicable sustainment contracts.”
“The U.S. government has unlimited rights to all operation, maintenance, installation and training data delivered to the federal government that permits the DoD to take care of and operate the aircraft,” Lockheed added.
The training process for service members to take care of the F-35 can be lacking, GAO said. Maintainers told GAO they mainly learned the way to fix the jet while on the job. Initial Lockheed Martin-led training mainly relied on PowerPoint slides in a classroom, with limited hands-on lessons, GAO said.
Training personnel acknowledged to GAO the upkeep training is “poor and inadequate,” adding that because Lockheed Martin runs the training, the firm controls what information is presented to maintainers.
“Since a lot of the technical data used to take care of the aircraft is proprietary and unavailable to the military services, trainers within the military services cannot develop effective training programs for maintainers,” GAO wrote.
The situation differs considerably from F-15 and F-16 maintenance, which incorporates detailed manuals spelling out how the systems operate that allow maintainers to troubleshoot nagging problems.
But at one location, F-35 maintainers told GAO that “they’ve access to so little technical information on the aircraft that they don’t fully understand the aircraft or the way to troubleshoot common problems.”
This implies they repeatedly must seek the advice of contractor personnel to assist with these maintenance tasks, GAO said. In a single case, maintainers told the watchdog, a unit that had trouble with an F-35′s ejection seat had to move a contractor by helicopter to a ship to repair the part.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.