Commentary
A September 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the F-35 revealed some shocking statistics on just how unready hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of F-35s are to provide actual combat power. In fact, the report indicated that only 15 percent to 30 percent of F-35s may be capable of combat.
But if you were to read a typical article in the media, you might believe that, on average, some 55 percent of F-35s are combat-capable. However, you would be wrong. You see, when the average person sees a report declaring that 55 percent of F-35 combat aircraft are “mission capable,” they assume mission capable equals combat capable. But they are being deceived.
The deception comes from how the F-35 program office and the whole of the Department of Defense (DOD) define “mission capable.” It turns out that the DOD definition of “mission capable” does not mean combat capable. What it means is that an aircraft can fly and perform at least one mission. So a plane designated as mission capable might be capable of doing some type of combat, but it might not. Instead, the mission it’s capable of executing could be testing or training or some other mission that does not involve combat. And even if it is considered capable of testing or training, it might not be capable of doing the full gamut of testing or training you would expect from a fully functional aircraft. Likewise, it could still be classified as mission capable even if it is only capable of executing a portion of the combat-type missions it is supposed to be able to perform.
Hence, within the environs of the military–industrial–congressional complex, “mission capable” is a highly ambiguous term that allows for a whole lot of gaming of accountability metrics. And it tells us very little. Still, it is worth noting that at a 55 percent mission capable rate, the F-35 fleet is well below program targets of 90 percent for the F-35A (Air Force) and 85 percent for the fighter’s F-35B (Marine Corps) and F-35C (Navy) variants. In other words, the F-35 fleet as a whole is nowhere near meeting its mission capability goal of being able to do anything at all.
However, there is another metric that is more useful: “full mission capable.” It turns out that “full mission capable” F-35s are supposed to be able to perform all the missions for which they were contracted, including combat-oriented missions, surveillance, training, testing, and shows of force. This metric is not often publicized, but in the case of the F-35, the watchdog side of the GAO actually did a detailed report of the problems with the F-35 that included how the F-35 fleet looked from the “full mission capable” perspective.
Even for someone who is an F-35 realist, the results are shocking. Not only is the F-35 fleet’s full mission capable rate in the neighborhood of 30 percent (see the table on page 96 of the report), but also the full mission capable rate of the Marine Corps’ F-35B was a miserable 15.5 percent in March 2023. More current full mission capable rates have not been published, but given the program’s ongoing problems, including unreliable engines that are now “under-specced“ because of feature creep, it is highly unlikely that the situation has improved in the past year.
And then there is the fact that being fully mission capable is no indicator of how well the plane executes its missions. For example, the F-35 could be designated as mission capable for conducting close air support missions despite that the F-35 is the very antithesis of what a close air support plane should be and is not capable of executing genuine close air support.
But given the F-35’s unreliability, talking about full mission capability rates of anything approaching even 50 percent is a pipe dream. And it cannot be overemphasized that the F-35/Joint Strike Fighter has been in development since 1994, costing billions of dollars.
This brings us back to the question of just how many of the more than 600 F-35s delivered to the U.S. military can provide significant, nontrivial combat ability. The answer is that we really don’t know. But if we combine the F-35’s fragility with its very low full mission-capable and sortie generation rates, it probably isn’t many. Especially not when you think of how many decades and billions of dollars we have dumped into it.
Nevertheless, we will continue to dump billions of dollars into the F-35 program that is already “more than a decade delayed and $183 billion over its original plans,” according to the GAO, as long as the incestuous relationship among defense contractors, the military, and Congress is permitted to dominate defense procurement.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
