The Bunker: An F-35 in every garage

This week in The Bunker: In its rush to buy F-35s, the Pentagon is shortchanging the spare parts and maintenance needed to keep them flying; Congress orders the military to keep flying fleets of warplanes it wants to retire; the sole threat from China; and more.

June 17, 2026

‘Nuff said, for now.

Eager, and willing, to be convinced otherwise.

Imagine if you owned cars like these

In the tonier suburbs of Washington, D.C., including those housing defense-industry titans, you can find palatial homes boasting four-car garages. Common sense suggests the cars inside actually work. But imagine if only one of four were running. That’s basically what we’re getting with the Pentagon’s latest-and-greatest (and costliest, of course) jet fighter.

The Pentagon has spent so much money buying F-35 fighters for the Air Force, the Navy(PDF), and Marines, that it hasn’t invested enough in the repair shops and spare parts needed to keep the planes it already owns flying, according to a June 11 report from the Government Accountability Office. It’s the latest in a depressingly long litany of reports from the congressional watchdog highlighting too little F-35 bang for too many F-35 bucks.

Even the Defense Department’s own F-35 brass said this sucking financial chest wound is because the military services are guilty of “historically underinvesting in sustainment — prioritizing procurement of aircraft early in the program’s life cycle over the creation of critical depot and repair capability.” Predictably, that has yielded a “sustainment system [that] cannot fully support the F-35 fleet,” the GAO found.

Absent what the Pentagon calls “significant changes” — what normal people call “billions of dollars” — the F-35s’ anemic readiness rates will “worsen over time as more F-35s are added to the fleet.” The Pentagon currently flies — um, has — more than 800 F-35s, and plans to buy a total of 2,470. But spare-parts shortages, software problems, and corrosion are keeping many of them grounded. The Defense Department told the GAO that it will need to spend an additional $13.7 billion over the next six years to pump up their declining readiness.

It’s hard to believe the F-35’s readiness can dive any lower. Despite record levels of defense spending, the F-35’s ready-for-action rates are in a death spiral. If it were a real plane instead of a $2 trillion program, the real pilot in the real cockpit would really be thinking about bailing out about now. The F-35’s full mission capable rate — where the plane can perform as advertised — fell from a lousy 38% in 2021 to a pathetic 25% in 2025. When graded on the curve — what the Pentagon calls its mission capability rate, meaning it can perform at least one of its assigned tasks — F-35 readiness has fallen from 67% to 44% over the same timeframe. The aircraft has six main missions, according to the Pentagon: “strategic attack, suppression/destruction of enemy air defenses, offensive/defensive counter air, anti-surface warfare, strike coordination and reconnaissance, and close air support.” In 2018, then-defense secretary James Mattis ordered the F-35 and other fighters to have a mission capable rate of 80%, but that formal requirement disappeared shortly after he did (it remains a target, along with a full mission capable rate of 65%).

GAO fiscal fussbudgets also zinged the Pentagon for paying readiness-related bonuses — sometimes in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” — to F-35 builder Lockheed even as readiness fell. “It risks rewarding contractor performance that does not help meet program goals,” the GAO said tartly. The Defense Department, the agency added in a twist of its budgetary blade, also lacked “accurate records” for such bonuses paid in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Perhaps, the auditors suggested, the Pentagon should consider “adopting alternative incentive approaches, such as penalties for poor performance.” Yea, right. And “GAO” stands for “Guffaws All Over…”

The Pentagon, as it almost always does, agreed with the three recommendations the GAO made in this latest report. But it “did not provide formal comments” on how it plans to do so. Tellingly, the Pentagon has implemented only 14 of the 46 recommendations the GAO has made since 2012 on how to better manage the F-35 program. Key contractors also pledge to up their game. Lockheed says it has spent more than $2 billion to produce spare parts faster, and engine maker Pratt & Whitney adds that it has invested more than $1 billion to do the same.

That’s all well and good. But The Bunker has witnessed these Pentagon pathologies for decades, including the F-35's first 25 years — it’s still suffering teething pains after a quarter-century! Responsible parties include those in uniform and their co-dependent contractors over-promising and under-delivering. Those rosy fudges are compounded by Pentagon civilians, and the U.S. military’s overlords on Capitol Hill, who refuse to hold these wayward weapon wastrels accountable. Until that changes, we’re in for perpetually dreadful F-35 assessments whenever the GAO, or any other honest outside observer, demands an honest bang-for-buck accounting.

Non-retirement requirements

Buying new warplanes while neglecting to pay for what’s needed to keep them flying is one way the Pentagon wastes money. But there’s a second way, too. Refreshingly, it’s not the Defense Department’s fault. It’s when lawmakers bar the Pentagon from dispatching old and tired planes to the boneyard.

There’s been a spate of such edicts recently:

In its version of the 2027 defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee has ordered the Air Force not to retire any of its E-3 AWACS — Airborne Warning and Control System — aircraft next year. It extends the existing one-year ban by another year.
The same panel told the Air Force it cannot retire any of its 184 F-22 fighters until at least 2032. Congress first barred F-22 retirements through 2028 four years ago. The service said in 2023 that the $7 billion it would need to keep them flying would be better spent on its fledgling Next Generation Air Dominance fighter. The NGAD is now known as the F-47, named to honor (of course) the current, and 47^th, commander-in-chief.
The House Appropriations Committee bars the Air Force from mothballing any more than two of its 23 Cold War-era U-2 spy planes next year. The service wants to replace the entire fleet with other aircraft, drones, and satellites.

Such proposals are part of a trend also affecting F-15E fighters, RQ-4 Global Hawk drones, KC-135 aerial tankers, and C-130 cargo planes.

It’s hard to know who to root for in such dogfights, because the Pentagon isn’t always right. The Air Force, for example, has been trying to retire its A-10 attack plane, beloved by the grunts on the ground for coming to their rescue on the battlefield, since forever. Lawmakers fear new weapons aren’t ready for prime time (cf., F-35, above). Sometimes — horrors — even jobs back home are involved.

“Whenever the Pentagon doesn’t want a weapons system and Congress does, there’s a smell of pork in the air,” says Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information here at the Project On Government Oversight. And, too often the military wants to send planes out to pasture so it can buy new ones to hang around hangars because they lack the spare parts needed to keep them airborne.

The boot industrial complex

“Rent-seeking” means tweaking public policy to benefit private interests. It happens at the highest levels of the U.S. military, when contractors seek rules or offer favors that give them an edge over their competitors. It can involve clandestine meetings to change military specifications, lobbying, campaign contributions, and the wink-wink of post-Pentagon employment.

Then there are the more blatant special pleadings. Take the U.S. shoe industry complaining that too many U.S. troops are wearing boots from — you knew this was coming — China. Yes, U.S.-military-issued boots have to be made in the U.S. But military personnel are free to buy and wear their own footwear (sometimes using their Pentagon-funded uniform allowance) that doesn’t have to be domestically produced. That’s why the U.S. Footwear Manufacturers Association (USFMA) is pushing the Better Outfitting Our Troops (BOOTS) Act.

“A loophole in the law has encouraged U.S. military personnel to purchase an estimated one million pairs of cheap foreign-made combat boots each year,” William McCann, USFMA chief argues. “Many of them come from China, which has already shown a willingness to weaponize exports that the U.S. military arsenal cannot do without.”

But Kyle S. Reyes, a military and law-enforcement advocate, counters that makers of “American-made `blister boots’” have only themselves to blame. Last year, a Marine inspection found that nearly 25% of U.S.-made footwear didn’t meet the corps’ standards. “The world’s most lethal force is literally voting with its feet,” Reyes adds, “and Congress should be listening.”

Turns out it is, at least for now. The House Armed Services Committee gave McCann’s proposal the boot June 5. McCann said his lobbying group simply has to work harder to prevail. Five days after what Sourcing Journal called “a stinging legislative blow,” the USFMA got reinforcements by enlisting another U.S. manufacturer in the fight.

Ain’t democracy grand?

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