Whatever you might think of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, it’s safe to say that the Joint Program Office hasn’t had a particularly good week. Reports of hypoxia, cyber security concerns, and the need for a major cost review followed the appearance of a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit, detailing significant and increasingly expensive maintenance issues, which leaked its way to the press ahead of an official public release. By far the biggest story is the GAO report, which Bloomberg was first to reveal on Oct. 23, 2017, paints a distinctly unflattering picture of the U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps abilities in particular to keep their existing F-35s flyable, breaking down its findings into five core challenges. There’s a major delay in getting depot-level maintenance facilities up and running and a massive spare parts shortage. Beyond that, the Joint Program Office hadn’t even figured out what technical data it would need to support the aircraft going forward and the U.S. Navy and Marines didn’t have vital intermediate maintenance capabilities in place to support planned operational deployments. Lastly, there were serious concerns with the status of the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), the cloud-based computer network that is central to keeping the aircraft going on a day-to-day basis.

“These challenges are largely the result of sustainment plans that do not fully include key requirements or aligned (timely and sufficient) funding,” GAO explained in it’s the final public version, which it released in Oct. 26, 2017. The Pentagon “is taking steps to address some challenges, but without more comprehensive plans and aligned funding, [the Department of Defense] risks being unable to fully leverage the F-35’s capabilities and sustain a rapidly expanding fleet.” That’s an exceptionally diplomatic way of describing the findings, which the Congressional watchdog said were the result, in large of part, of a confluence of mismatched priorities and delays requiring program officials to divert already limited funds. Though this particular report did not mention it by name, GAO has in the past repeatedly criticized the policy of concurrency, in which the U.S. military began buying F-35s before the development cycle finished, requiring repeated and costly upgrades to existing airframes. We at the War Zone have discussed this issue in depth many times, most recently after earlier reports that the Air Force was considering stopping upgrading some of its exist jets to cut costs, but which would leave it with dozens of planes that would be, at best, suitable for limited training purposes in the future.

USAF A US Air Force F-35A.

At present, according to GAO, F-35s across the U.S. military were already ending up sidelined because of issues in the maintenance and logistics chains. Plans for an internal U.S. military capacity to perform depot level maintenance on the Joint Strike Fighter are six years behind schedule. As a result, when personnel remove parts from one of the jets for that type of service, they have to send it either to one of the depots that are operational or back to the original manufacturer. The objective timeline for getting those parts, or suitable replacements, back into the logistics chain is supposed to be between 60 and 90 days. As of May, GOA found that, due to backlogs and shortages, the average timeline was more than 170 days.

GAO

This had contributed to a massive parts shortage that had a direct impact on aircraft readiness rates. Between January and the beginning of August 2017, approximately 22 percent of the F-35 fleet in total across all services on average was not available specifically due to the lack of spares on hand. At some points its was 25 percent or more. In other words, this figure is not an overall availability rate, just the percentage due to lack of spares alone. Another contributing factor was the continuing lack of agreement between the F-35 Joint Program Office and Lockheed Martin on the transfer of technical data. The U.S. military had yet to even create a comprehensive catalog of all the data it felt it would need to operate and sustain the aircraft. This had trickled down in the maintenance pipeline, preventing the creation of a complete set of maintenance instructions for ground crews more than 10 years after the F-35 first took to the skies. Without a clear troubleshooting, maintainers were routinely sending parts to the depot when they could’ve made the fixes on site or at an intermediate facility.

GAO

Sometimes they would identify the wrong part as the problem and order a replacement only to find that the issue was still there afterwards, requirement more downtime and delays. Personnel at one depot told GAO’s investigators that nearly 70 percent of the parts they were receiving from F-35 squadrons weren’t even broken. Due to protocols, and not knowing for sure themselves, they still had to spend 10 hours testing each one. The lack of a well established knowledge base within the U.S. military itself undoubtedly helps explain why Naval Air Systems command announced a plan on Oct. 26, 2017 to award a sole-source contract to Lockheed Martin specifically to hire F-35 subject matter experts. The notice did not say how much the deal would cost, but did say that it would support the more than a dozen existing foreign F-35 customers, many of whom are likely dealing with a similar lack of information. Needless to say, these issues were sucking up time and resources and costing the government millions. This was one of the many reasons why, between 2012 and 2016, life cycle cost estimates for the F-35 fleet had grown by more than 20 percent. During the 2017 fiscal year alone, the Navy and Marine Corps spare parts costs surged from the original budget request of $261 million to more than $400 million.

GAO

It should come as no surprise that on Oct. 24, 2017, the U.S. announced there would be major review of the F-35 supply chain and its associated costs. The Pentagon may have hoped this announcement would have headed off the formal release of the GAO report later in the week. “Lockheed is familiar with this process because we’ve done it before with them, so this isn’t something new,” Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s Director of Defense Pricing told Defense News, somewhat tellingly noting that they had gone through this process at least once in the past. “Many of the things we’re talking about are just practices that have occurred in the past, this will just be much more rigorous. … And we’ll also lay out for them: Here’s our plan in terms of your subcontractor base, and this is what we want to do, and then get off and get the work done.” Assad specifically told Defense News that the Pentagon had a goal of further reducing the unit cost of each F-35, notably getting the price of a new F-35A model down to approximately $80 million. He did not mention the soaring sustainment costs that could easily outpace any such savings.

USAF A electronics technician removes a broken circuit board from a piece of the F-35A's communications systems during depot-level maintenance.