A recent Defense Department decision to approve full rate production of the troubled F-35 raises questions about whether Congress has the required access to the information they need to effectively oversee major defense acquisition programs and to challenge those that aren’t ready for production. A highly classified report issued by the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation to assess the initial operational capabilities of the F-35 was made available only briefly to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Despite many deficiencies revealed in the report, DOD approved full rate production about a month after its release. The deficiencies are apparent in even the heavily redacted version of the report obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Project On Government Oversight. These deficiencies include the following:
The rapid approval despite serious unresolved issues highlights the need for more effective congressional oversight. Laws such as the Nunn-McCurdy Act and the Operational Test and Evaluation of Defense Acquisition Programs law are designed to guarantee Congress access to critical information about DOD acquisition programs so they can effectively oversee those programs. Unfortunately, congressional staff seem to have had limited access to and very little time with the report in which to understand the state of the F-35 program. Further, the statutes don’t explicitly provide Congress with a mechanism to object to a Pentagon decision to approve full rate production other than its power of the purse to decide how many to buy, and when.
We believe there are opportunities to amend the Operational Test and Evaluation law, Nunn-McCurdy, or both, and to otherwise increase Congress’s capacity to understand and act on troubling information found in the testing office’s reports. These include the following:
Amending Nunn-McCurdy to include performance thresholds in addition to the existing financial thresholds that trigger specific oversight actions
Requiring the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation to provide unclassified versions of their reports to congressional staff
Requiring a waiting period between delivery of the testing office’s reports to Congress and full rate production decisions
Specific Deficiencies Cited in Testing Office Report
While the overall conclusions of the report obtained by POGO are obscured by redaction, the testing office’s F-35 report identifies numerous deficiencies that one might expect would make it impossible to conclude that the F-35 is “ready for combat.” The following are the most glaring. Any one of them is sufficient grounds to challenge any assertion that the F-35 is “ready for combat.” That Congress didn’t suggests they didn’t have the access and time they needed to meaningfully assess the report.
It’s one thing to talk in the abstract about availability and mission capable rates. It’s quite another to see that, even with contractor support in a benign test environment and with advanced scheduling, they struggled to get four out of six airplanes in the air: “Launching F-35 4-ship formations of a single variant proved to be a challenge in the IOT&E [Initial Operational Test and Evaluation] open-air trials, due to maintenance-related aircraft availability issues.”
The lack of flyable aircraft led to cases where tests were deemed invalid and sometimes needed to be redesigned and re-flown. These kinds of do-overs are generally not available in the real world.
Overall, the F-35 failed to meet all but one of its availability, reliability, and maintainability requirements.
IOT&E F-35 Availability, Reliability, and Maintainability Metrics
We’re accustomed to military systems failing to meet their reliability requirements, but it’s worth noting how lax some of the requirements have become. For example, one requirement for the F-35 is to have two hours of mean flight hours between unplanned maintenance events (one and a half hours for the Marine and Navy variants); this means that the Pentagon is only expecting the F-35 to fly a couple of hours between breakdowns. And that’s allowing for nine hours of planned maintenance per flight hour.
It’s unacceptable that the F-35 can’t meet even these modest requirements.
F-35’s Logistics Train is So Big It’s Hard to Deploy
It’s one thing to have F-35’s unavailable due to maintenance backlogs; it’s another to have them unavailable because you can’t get them deployed where you need them.
While all variants of the F-35 support in-flight refueling and, like older fighters such as F-15s, can fly thousands of miles to reach their targets when necessary, they are intended to be “forward deployed” near their targets. This should allow them to reach their targets, return, re-arm, and fly to new targets much faster, dramatically increasing their effectiveness. The Air Force plans to do this by flying their support equipment to forward locations in big cargo planes like the C-17. The Marines’ plan is to deploy them on amphibious assault ships. The Navy will get the F-35 to the front lines by deploying them on enormous supercarriers like the Nimitz and Ford CVN-class ships.
In each of these cases, the amount of equipment and supplies needed to support the F-35 is referred to as its “logistics footprint.”
Unfortunately, according to the testing office’s report:
The logistics footprint for land-based deployments exceeds the requirement by about two times the number of C-17 loads (mostly due to the size of support equipment). The F-35B did not meet the logistics footprint for LHD/LHA6-class ship-based deployments (it met the weight, but did not meet the volume requirements), while the F-35C did meet the logistics footprint for CVN-class ship-based deployments.
For Air Force F-35As, exceeding the intended logistics footprint means it will take longer to get them forward deployed and will require more airlift resources. The Air Force may have to wait for two extra plane loads of gear to arrive at the desired forward location, and the extra logistics requirements make those resources unavailable for other missions.
“It’s one thing to have F-35’s unavailable due to maintenance backlogs; it’s another to have them unavailable because you can’t get them deployed where you need them.”
For Marine F-35Bs, not being able to fit the required support equipment on an amphibious assault ship presents an even more serious problem. It may mean they can’t be deployed to the intended amphibious assault ships at all. They will either have to put to sea with less support equipment, likely making their availability even worse, or they’ll have to take away space from other mission-critical equipment carried on those ships.
Fortunately, the F-35’s logistics footprint does meet the requirements for deployment on the CVN-class aircraft carriers on which they’re deployed.
Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Making Maintenance Easier
While hopes are high in the defense community that artificial intelligence will make many complex tasks easier, this does not seem to have been the case for the F-35’s vaunted Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS):
ALIS is the backbone of maintenance support for the F-35 aircraft. Squadrons depend on it to support day-to-day flight operations and maintenance activities. During IOT&E [Initial Operational Test and Evaluation], ALIS demonstrated poor usability and impeded, rather than facilitated, effective maintenance operations. … DOT&E Report, p. 4-3
Efforts to tackle the high false alarm rates have so far not yielded major progress toward meeting threshold requirements. Before IOT&E began, the program introduced software based filters within ALIS to screen [the Prognostic Health Management system] from generating work orders for false alarms. While it has been refining these filters ever since, a large number of false alarms still result in non actionable maintenance work orders. One cause of high false alarm rates is that new aircraft software loads, or new versions of hardware, tend to produce new false alarms, and the [Prognostic Health Management system] filters lag the pace of system updates. DOT&E Report, p. 4-42
While ALIS is scheduled to be replaced with the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN) system, ODIN was not included in these tests and isn’t scheduled to complete the initial phase of its hardware deployment until 2025. This initial phase will simply migrate the existing ALIS software to the cloud, presumably continuing the false alarms experienced in the testing. Later, as yet unscheduled, phases of ODIN deployment hope to upgrade the software itself.
Stealth Capabilities Are Hard to Maintain, and Were Not Fully Tested
Stealth, or “low observability” of aircraft signatures, was meant to be a key benefit of the F-35 design:
The intent of the F-35 Block 3 development program was to deliver a strike fighter aircraft … yielding improvements in lethality and survivability over earlier generations of aircraft, through the introduction of innovative, “5th-generation” design features, with respect to aircraft signatures and electronic mission systems capabilities. … The aircraft was to achieve lethality in this way while remaining survivable through a combination of low observability improvements to the airframe and engines, in the form of radar and infrared signature reduction, and through defensive mission systems capabilities, including advanced countermeasures. [Emphasis added] DOT&E Report, page number redacted.
Yet stealth features of the F-35 were so difficult to maintain that they were at least partially inoperative during much of the testing, calling into question both their necessity and the feasibility of maintaining them:
All F-35A sorties were flown with aircraft that had a noncompliant LO [low observability] signature. Four out of the five F-35B aircraft, and 80 percent of individual sorties, were LO non-compliant. None of the F-35C aircraft were reported as LO non-compliant. [Emphasis added] DOT&E Report p. xxiii
Does it make sense to approve full rate production for what is supposed to be a stealth aircraft when we don’t know whether we’ll be able to maintain its stealth capabilities, even under benign conditions?
The Gun Still Doesn’t Work
News stories in March talked about the gun now being “effective.” It seems unlikely that in the short period between the February report from the testing office and these articles that the fundamental, physical issues with the gun were resolved. The report is blunt in this respect: “The F-35 lethality assessment suffered from the inability of the F-35’s gun to hit the targets because of design and installation issues.”
The idea that all of the problems identified by the testing office could have been solved for the hundreds of F-35s in the Air Force’s inventory (the Marine and Navy versions lack a built-in gun) and verified with testing within a month defies credulity. One potential explanation for these articles is that a recent software release addresses previous problems with providing accurate targeting information to the pilot, rather than addressing the ability of the gun to place rounds in a tight, predictable grouping.
“Does it make sense to approve full rate production for what is supposed to be a stealth aircraft when we don’t know whether we’ll be able to maintain its stealth capabilities, even under benign conditions?”
In the meantime, it seems clear that it will take months, if not years, to address the physical design and installation issues currently making the gun inaccurate in existing and new F-35As. Enhancing current laws such as Nunn-McCurdy and the Operational Test and Evaluation law would provide more of an opportunity for Congress to question how a fighter plane can be ready for combat when its gun remains inaccurate.
Role of Operational Test and Evaluation Law and Reports in Full Rate Production Approval
The Operational Test and Evaluation law prohibits full rate production until operational testing is performed. It also requires a report expressing the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation’s opinion on whether the testing was adequate and successful, and that the report be shared with congressional defense committees. It does not, however, require that the reports be readable by those committees or that the committees be consulted before DOD decides to proceed with full rate production.
In this case, the report was issued in February 2024, and the decision to move into full rate production was made on March 12, 2024. As of October 2024, the staff of some Armed Services Committee members still have not seen any version of this report, and because the conclusions of the report are themselves classified, it would be difficult for them to publicly explain any objections without unlawfully revealing classified information. It is illegal for members of Congress and their staff to raise objections based on those conclusions.
Require Unclassified Versions of Testing Office Reports
The Operational Test and Evaluation law requires that the testing office’s reports be submitted to Congress exactly as they are submitted to the secretary of defense. As a result, they must carry the same security classification, which may exceed the clearance possessed by congressional staff. According to the law:
Each such report shall be submitted to those committees in precisely the same form and with precisely the same content as the report originally was submitted to the Secretary and Under Secretary and shall be accompanied by such comments as the Secretary may wish to make on the report.
It is nevertheless possible to create versions of these reports, often through redaction, that carry lower levels of classification. Indeed, the version of the F-35 report by the testing office obtained by POGO is unclassified, and we understand it is common for DOD to prepare less classified versions of materials for congressional staff’s use. (We don’t know what level of classification the original, unredacted version of the report carries.)
In some cases, DOD reports not only carry a classification of Top Secret but also are designated “Special Access,” which means they are only available to a very small number of individuals who “need to know.” In the case of this report, it may only be the three staffers assigned to “Test and Evaluation” within the Senate Armed Services Committee who would have access to this report. (The House Armed Services Committee does not publicly list its staff assignments.)
We believe the Operational Test and Evaluation law should be amended to require the testing office to submit an unclassified version of reports to Congress in addition to classified versions, and to submit versions at other levels of classification at the request of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and individual committee members.
Require Overall Conclusions of Testing Office Reports Be Unclassified
It is important that the staff of congressional committees and individual committee members be able to read the overall conclusions of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation reports. With this in mind, we support requiring that conclusions about the adequacy of testing and about whether the weapon is ready for combat be unclassified.The justifications for these conclusions could remain classified in order to protect sensitive information.
In the case of the unclassified version of the testing office’s F-35 report provided to POGO through FOIA, not only are these conclusions redacted, so is the entire table of contents and many of the page numbers. Many pages were also included out of order. The combined effect was to make the report unnecessarily hard to interpret.
Armed Services Committees Explicitly Concur or Object to Overall Findings in Testing Office Reports
While Congress does hold the power of the purse to slow or halt procurement regardless of whether the Defense Department has approved full rate production, overall transparency and oversight would be improved if the House and Senate Armed Services Committees were required to go on record as concurring or disagreeing with the testing office’s assessment regarding a program’s readiness for combat. Congress would be motivated to seek appropriate clearances for their staff and to ask clarifying questions of DOD in order to cast informed votes. Likewise, members of Congress at large would benefit from knowing whether the Armed Services Committees concurred with the testing office’s assessments when voting on the National Defense Authorization Act.
Potential Solutions for Nunn-McCurdy Act
In addition to opportunities to shore up the Operational Test and Evaluation law, there are opportunities through the Nunn-McCurdy Act to establish a strong oversight framework, and some congressional staff are talking about doing so. Nunn-McCurdy requires Pentagon program managers to report to Congress whenever a program’s unit costs increase beyond each of a set of thresholds. In the case of critical breaches of program unit costs, the program is presumed to be canceled unless the secretary of defense restructures and certifies the program.
The F-35 already experienced a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach in 2009 and has been restructured and re-baselined from a cost perspective, yet the program still struggles to manage its cost and schedule. In order for Nunn-McCurdy to enhance accountability around F-35 performance and that of other major weapons programs, it would need to be enhanced to include operational performance thresholds, such as mission capable rates, mean time to repair, and other parameters discussed in the testing office’s report and this analysis. Given the different impacts of these performance parameters on different programs, different Nunn-McCurdy performance thresholds might have to be determined on a program-by-program basis.
The Defense Department’s March 12, 2024, decision to authorize full rate production of the F-35 flies in the face of numerous deficiencies cited in the Operational Test & Evaluation report released in February. Even the declassified version of that report obtained by POGO includes numerous citations of failures of the F-35 to meet requirements in terms of availability, reliability, maintainability, gun accuracy, logistical supportability, and stealth. Congress’s opportunity to exercise oversight was limited by the short time between the report’s release and the full rate production decision, the lack of Senate and House Armed Services Committees’ staff cleared to read the report, and the lack of built-in mechanisms for Congress to influence the full rate production decision.
Congress’s ability and inclination to provide effective oversight of major acquisition programs such as the F-35 could be improved through amendments to existing laws such as the Operational Test and Evaluation law and the Nunn-McCurdy Act. In particular, modest adjustments to language in the Operational Test and Evaluation law could dramatically increase Congress’s timely visibility into the performance of major systems, and Nunn-McCurdy could, with some modification, extend its powerful checks on DOD authority to apply to the operational performance of military systems, in addition to its current coverage of financial performance issues.
