Pentagon Is Seen Short $7.1 Billion on What It Needs to Fly F-35
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. military is confronting a projected $7.1 billion shortfall in the cost of operating its F-35 jets during the years the fighter will be flying at maximum capacity compared with current long-range budget forecasts, according to a draft audit by Congress’s watchdog agency.
The Air Force, Marines and Navy “collectively face annual multibillion-dollar gaps between the projected costs to sustain their respective F-35 fleets” starting in about 2036 and their “stated affordability goals,” Diana Maurer, a Government Accountability Office director, informed two House Armed Services subcommittees Thursday in previewing a draft report
As the F-35 built by Lockheed Martin Corp. has begun to surmount years of delays and escalating costs for development and production, attention has turned increasingly to the long-term price to maintain and operate the complex planes.
Maurers’s written testimony summarizes well-known current problems including flawed software and engine shortages while acknowledging some improvements in “mission-capable rates” for the planes. But it also puts a new focus on the long-term “sustainment” costs, an unresolved issue that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin inherited from the Trump administration.
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