Investing.com - The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps need to spend an additional $13.7 billion through 2031 to boost declining readiness rates of the F-35 jet, the world’s biggest weapons program, the Pentagon told congressional auditors. The Government Accountability Office released the report Thursday.
The Pentagon program office’s new funding request seeks to address challenges including a lack of spare parts and heavy reliance on contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp. (NYSE:LMT). More than half of the $13.7 billion is for spare parts necessary to increase the rates at which the aircraft are deemed capable of completing missions.
The mission capable rate across the F-35 fleet declined from 67 percent in fiscal year 2021 to 44 percent in fiscal year 2025. The full mission capable rate declined from 38 percent to 25 percent over the same period.
The Pentagon paid its contractor hundreds of millions in incentives since 2020 to improve F-35 readiness, but these incentives have not been effective, the GAO found. The U.S. military services will annually face a more than $1 billion gap between the projected costs to sustain their F-35s and their affordability goals by the mid-2030s.
The GAO found that multiple risks threaten the program office’s ability to achieve goals under the new strategy, called the Global Support Solution Reset. The program office will be reliant on the private sector to deliver more than $7 billion in additional parts and other material, but capacity constraints persist for key parts.
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