AOC: The top Pentagon buyer said today the operating cost for the F-35 has to come down at the same time that mission capable rates must ramp up by double-digits. And it needs to happen in less than a year.

“Cost per flight hour needs to come down to fourth-generation [aircraft] levels and the availability needs to come up to 80 percent,” Ellen Lord told the Association of Old Crows electronic warfare conference this morning.

F-35 program head Vice Adm. Mat Winter, said in October that the crucial operating costs of the F-35 dropped significantly in 2017. The costs of operating the F-35 fleet dropped by $1.1 million “per tail per year across the fleet” and cited “a reduction of $12,000 per flight hour across the fleet.”

It was the latest in a long line of calls from Lord and other Pentagon officials to slash F-35 operating costs while the Air Force and Navy continue to spend tens of billions to buy more aircraft. The latest available data has the F-35 hanging around at about 55 percent availability, making Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ Pentagon-wide call for most fighters to hit the 80 percent mark by next September a tall order. But Lord said she can get it done.

However, there is a very wide spread in readiness rates for the F-35 fleet, depending on when they were built. Generally speaking, the older an F-35 is, the lower its readiness rates. During the first F-35 deployment to Europe last year, Air Force F-35As from the 34th Fighter Squadron deployed to RAF Lakenheath in the U.K. in April and later flew to Estonia and Bulgaria. “Our overall mission capable rate for this F-35 deployment (to the U.K., Estonia and Bulgaria) was 87.5 percent,” Col. David Lyons, the 388th Fighter Wing commander, told reporters. “And my current rate for my F-16s that are doing great work in Spain is 75 percent.”

In September, Mattis signed an order demanding that availability rates for the Air Force and Navy’s F-35, F-22, F-16 and F-18 inventories reach 80 percent in an attempt to blunt the slow slide in readiness seen in recent years.

The F-35s per flight hour operating costs have already fallen and are edging closer to those of of F-16, according to Air Force officials. At the Farnborough Air Show in July, Lockheed Martin executives said they believe they can reduce operation and maintenance costs by 38 percent over the next decade.

But no matter how much it might cost to fly, the F-35’s mission will remain the same: crunch massive amounts of data while finding ways to operate alongside multiple fighter platforms that don’t share its technical prowess and design billed as a “flying computer.”

Lord said that will require upgrades to older, 4th generation aircraft so they can share data and keep up with the F-35. In addition to sharing the F-35s much better situational awareness, it also means the 4th gen planes can use the F-35s much better targeting data.

“Electronic warfare is essential to the F-35. We need to make sure we are survivable in A2AD environments which are becoming more and more prevalent,” she said. “So we need to decide how we take that fifth gen capability and mix it with fourth gen capability.”

Overall, “we see the electromagnetic spectrum as a critical warfighting space, and therefore we’ve prioritized it.”

Lord also disclosed that Mattis has signed an order outlining how the Pentagon generates and consumes data, but the details are classified.

Colin contributed to this story.