A $2,000,000,000,000 Jet That Can Fly Every Mission Just One Day in Four.

The F-35 is the most expensive weapon system in the history of the United States — a program the Government Accountability Office now pegs at more than $2,000,000,000,000 over its full life cycle. On June 11, 2026, the GAO released a report with a blunt headline: the jet keeps getting more expensive to keep flying, and it keeps flying less.

The numbers are stark. In fiscal 2025, only 24.6 percent of the F-35 fleet was “fully mission capable” — ready to perform all of its assigned missions — down from 38 percent in 2021. Just over one jet in four. The broader “mission capable” rate, which counts a jet able to fly even a single tasked mission, fell to 44.1 percent, from 67 percent four years earlier. Both figures are the worst on record, and both are far below the program’s own targets.

This is not a partisan story. The F-35 has bled money and missed readiness goals across Democratic and Republican administrations alike — it is bipartisan defense waste, documented by Congress’s own auditors. What GAO did this June was put a price on the failure and warn that the Pentagon’s expensive fix may not work.

• $2,000,000,000,000+ — GAO's estimate of the F-35 program's total acquisition + sustainment cost over its life cycle; the sustainment slice alone is about $1.58 trillion · Source: GAO blog; GAO-24-106703
• 24.6% — the fleet's full mission capable rate in FY2025 — down from 38% in FY2021; the target under the new strategy is 65% by 2030 · Source: GAO-26-108113; Military Times
• 44.1% — the FY2025 mission capable rate — down from 67% in FY2021; the 2030 target is 80% · Source: GAO-26-108113; Shephard Media
• $13,700,000,000 — the extra funding DOD says it needs through FY2031 for its 'GSS Reset' to fix readiness by 2030 · Source: Breaking Defense; GAO
• 14 of 46 — GAO recommendations on F-35 sustainment since 2014 that DOD has actually implemented, as of March 2026 · Source: Air & Space Forces Magazine; GAO

GAO’s report (GAO-26-108113) is titled, with auditor restraint, “Actions Needed to Ensure Updated Strategy Improves Persistent Readiness Challenges.” Translated: the jets are not ready, the new plan might not fix it, and the bill keeps climbing. The fully-mission-capable rate — the share of the fleet able to perform every assigned mission at any given moment — sat at 24.6 percent in fiscal 2025. The Air Force’s F-35A variant fared even worse on some metrics, with one tally putting fully-mission-capable A-models around 28.5 percent. Whichever measure you use, roughly three out of four of America’s premier stealth fighters cannot do their full job on a given day.

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“The F-35 is DOD's most costly weapon system, but it hasn't met performance goals and costs to sustain the aircraft continue to increase.”

GAO-26-108113, F-35 Sustainment, June 11, 2026

The cost trajectory is its own scandal. GAO’s 2024 sustainment review found the program office estimated it will cost at least $1,580,000,000,000 just to operate and sustain the U.S. F-35 fleet across its life cycle — up from $1,100,000,000,000 in 2018, a 44 percent jump in five years. Add acquisition costs and the total tops $2,000,000,000,000. Part of the increase came from extending the fleet’s planned service life out to 2088. The grim irony GAO flagged: the services now plan to fly the jet less than originally projected, yet the cost to keep it flying keeps rising.

GAO laid out the mechanics of the grounding. The fleet is starved for spare parts: a 2025 Lockheed Martin study identified 48 parts the supplier base cannot make in sufficient quantity — including canopies, which GAO has repeatedly named as a top driver of grounded jets. Depot maintenance is a bottleneck; the backlog at Tinker Air Force Base, the primary depot for the F135 engine, has grown steadily as the program historically underinvested in sustainment infrastructure. Software delays meant some brand-new jets arrived unable to fly their missions at all. Corrosion problems added to the pile. The Pentagon now says it will need to lean on more than $7,000,000,000 in private-sector parts procurement to dig out.

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The most damning finding for taxpayers is about money the government chose to hand over. From 2020 through 2023, the F-35 Joint Program Office paid contractor Lockheed Martin more than $114,000,000 of roughly $269,000,000 in available incentive fees — bonuses tied to improving the fully-mission-capable rate and parts supply. Over the very same window, GAO found, those metrics “generally stagnated or worsened.” In plain terms: the Pentagon paid more than $114 million in performance bonuses while performance fell. GAO concluded the incentive thresholds were misaligned with what the services actually needed, and that the documentation behind the fee awards lacked basic quality control.

The Pentagon’s answer is the “Global Support Solution Reset,” launched in June 2025 and needing an estimated $13,700,000,000 more than previously planned through fiscal 2031. The plan leans on Lockheed putting more than $2,000,000,000 of advance funding into spare parts and engine-maker Pratt & Whitney investing over $1,000,000,000 across five years to boost F135 production by 20 percent. GAO’s caution is pointed: the same constrained industrial base that created the parts shortage now has to ramp up dramatically, and the program has no firm risk mitigation plan if it can’t. There is also a deeper structural problem — the Pentagon still lacks the technical data to maintain much of the jet independently of the contractor, which is part of why it keeps paying premium prices for parts and labor.

Strip away the acronyms and the picture is simple. The United States has committed more than $2,000,000,000,000 to a fighter that, on any given day, can fly all of its missions roughly one time in four — and the cost to keep it flying has risen 44 percent in five years even as the services plan to fly it less. The Pentagon paid its contractor over $114,000,000in readiness bonuses while readiness fell, and has implemented just 14 of GAO’s 46 sustainment recommendations since 2014. Now it wants another $13,700,000,000 for a fix its own auditors warn may not land until 2030, if it lands at all. This is the rare accountability story with no partisan villain — just a generation of bipartisan procurement decisions, and a bill that lands on every taxpayer regardless of party. We’ll track whether the GSS Reset moves the readiness numbers, or whether the next GAO report reads exactly like this one.

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Last updated June 22, 2026