200 F-35s indefinitely unfit for combat
The Pentagon may end up with about 200 F-35s that remain unready for war. Because of defense budget headaches, the money to fix them up is going somewhere else.
The Armed Services are presently spending their money on brand new Joint Strike Fighters. That means up to $40 billion in older planes built before the F-35 design was complete could forgo upgrades meant to bring them up to the latest standard.
Dan Grazier, an analyst for the Project on Government Oversight, explains in The National Interest that 108 early model F-35s may remain non-combat-rated that is, unprepared for combat and suitable only for air shows and training missions. There are also 81 early model Navy and Marine Corps F-35s in need of upgrades, which adds up to 189 F-35s that can’t go to war.
The root of this predicament is a procurement model known as concurrency. The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin knew that the F-35 program, which planned to deliver variants for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, would be immensely complex, requiring many years and billions of dollars to complete. While the basic prototype first flew in 2000, the F-35’s development took a total of more than 15 years. The final version of the F-35’s software, Block 3F, is still undergoing product testing.
