Will the Navy's Own Stealth F-35 Ever Go Into Battle?

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

The Navy’s F-35C is over 50 percent more expensive than the land-based F-35A at roughly $150 million per aircraft.

This problem is particularly endemic to F-35s of all types, but all aircraft in the navy and marine corps have been suffering from severe readiness problem related to their ageing inventory.

The F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter has weathered years of controversy over cost overruns, delays and performance trade-offs. The Pentagon has steadfastly maintained the type’s ability to penetrate enemy air defenses and network sensor data through its sophisticated computers will prove worth it. Indeed, by 2018, some of the persistent problems seemed to be abating, per-unit costs have begun to decrease, and the type saw its first combat operations serving with the Israeli Air Force and the U.S. Marines.

(This first appeared last month.)

However, the carrier-based F-35C model has arguably posed some of the biggest technical challenges for the program, and has thus been scheduled last for declaration of Initial Operating Capability (IOC) in 2019. Critics have repeatedly warned that IOC status has basically been declared arbitrarily for all models of the F-35 as a political decision, regardless of persistent technical defects and the fact that testing and evaluation were not yet complete—as is usually the case for IOC systems.

Indeed, in December 2018, John Pendleton of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified to Congress that only 15 percent of the Navy’s F-35Cs were rated fully mission-capable in 2017. You can see these figures in this GAO report, which also implies that the figures remain abysmal in 2018: “In June 2018, we reported that the F-35 program had not improved its reliability and maintainability over the past year and continued to fall short on half of its performance targets.”