U.S. Air Force F-35 fighters in last fiscal year (running October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025) had serious combat readiness problems, according to published U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO) data, due to range of problems only slightly more than quarter of aircraft were ready to perform all possible missions these fighters can be engaged in.
Air and Space Forces Magazine reports details. According to published chart, best situation is with Air Force F-35A fighters, but this is only 28.5%. Marine Corps F-35C aircraft show 22%, F-35B — 16.2%, while worst situation was with Navy F-35C — 15.3%.
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Defense Express notes that overall, looking at five-year chart, one can see full mission capable (FMC) situation for entire U.S. military F-35 fleet is at quite low level for F-35B and F-35C, including that in 2023 U.S. Marine Corps F-35Cs had full readiness of only 4.6%. Meanwhile F-35 fighters in 2020 had quite good indicator of as much as 54%, which has constantly fallen since.
At the same time, speaking about overall mission capable (MC) indicator, when aircraft can perform at least one mission from standard list, situation here appears completely opposite.
Worst indicator belongs to F-35A at 38.6%, whereas in 2020 it reached 71.4%. Best indicator held by Marine Corps F-35C — 64.2%, while Navy shows 54.2% on these aircraft, and Marine Corps F-35B — 53.9%.
However, overall combat aircraft readiness problem for American military is not new and is regularly discussed both in media and officially. To the point where due to manufacturer spare parts absence and patents, U.S. is forced to cannibalize weapons, including same F-35s. Also complaints arose that due to this, fifth-generation fighter pilots are supposedly forced to spend more time in simulators than in sky.
F-35 readiness problem reasons are generally quite varied, from corrosion problems to TR-3 (Technology Refresh-3) hardware-software update implementation delays and Block 4 modification overall.
However, root cause of all troubles is more conceptual and relates to F-35 fighter early lifecycle stages, when instead of paying attention to repair base development and necessary production capacities, priority was purchasing larger aircraft quantities.
Increasing F-35 readiness over next five years may cost taxpayers as much as $13.7 billion, meaning $2.74 billion annually. Of these, significant portion, specifically $7.3 billion, will go toward component and material procurement, another $3.1 billion toward warehouse capacity expansion and $3.3 billion toward maintenance financing and fuel procurement.
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