Lockheed Martin, the program’s lead contractor, desperately needed a win. The Pentagon was considering cutting the number of F-35s it planned to purchase after Senator John McCain (R-AZ), then the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned if the number was realistic. International customers were growing skeptical of the aircraft as the price ballooned. It is Lockheed Martin’s biggest program, and will cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion over its lifetime. A reduction in purchases, or loss of international customers, could have cost the company billions.

Luckily for Lockheed, it had a powerful ally in the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Joseph Dunford. Five years later, Dunford would be out of the service and ready to collect his first Lockheed Martin paycheck as a member of its board of directors.



Back in 2015, the F-35 program, already years behind schedule, faced a key program milestone. The goal was to have the F-35B ready for a planned July initial operational capability (IOC) declaration, a major step for the program, greenlighting the plane to be used in combat. The declaration is a sign that the aircraft is nearly ready for full deployment, that things are going well, that the contract, awarded in 2006, was finally producing a usable product. The ultimate decision was in Dunford’s hands.

About a week before the declaration, some in the Pentagon expressed serious doubts about the aircraft. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) obtained a memo through the Freedom of Information Act that revealed the performance of the jets to be poor. The memo, from the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, called foul on the test that was meant to demonstrate the ability of the F-35B to operate in realistic conditions. “[The test] did not—and could not—demonstrate that the Block 2B F-35B is operationally effective or suitable for use in any type of limited combat operation, or that it was ready for real-world operational deployments, given the way the event was structured,” the testing office concluded.

Dunford, however, said he had “full confidence” in the aircraft’s ability to support Marines in combat, despite the testing office’s report stating that if the aircraft encountered enemies, it would need to “avoid threat engagement”—in other words, to flee at the first sign of an enemy.