The F-35 Ages Worse Than the Planes It's Meant To Replace
House Republicans' budget would spend billions of dollars on the F-35's successor before the current model is even up to par.
As the U.S. grapples with ballooning federal budgets and increasingly necessary spending cuts, the military remains ripe for austerity. In February, the Pentagon suggested cutting $50 billion per year from its budget over the next five years—a good start but nowhere near enough, considering the Trump administration is floating a defense budget of nearly $1 trillion.
A recent government report detailed even further evidence that the F-35 stealth fighter jet is a program that deserves to be scrapped.
"The F-35 Lightning II aircraft (F-35) is the Department of Defense's (DOD) most ambitious and costly weapon system and its most advanced fighter aircraft," the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in April 2024. "However, DOD's projected costs for sustaining the F-35 continue to increase while planned use of the aircraft declines." (There are three primary variants: the F-35A, the F-35B, and the F-35C, which are primarily for use by the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy, respectively.)
"DOD plans to use the F-35 aircraft through 2088 and plans to spend over $2 trillion on acquisition and sustainment," the GAO noted, even though the department also "plans to fly the F-35 less than originally estimated, partly because of reliability issues with the aircraft."
Nonetheless, the report expressed some optimism over the F-35's future: "As of August 2023, the program was meeting or close to meeting 17 of its 24 reliability and maintainability goals, which are aimed at ensuring that the aircraft will be available for operations as opposed to out-of-service for maintenance," it noted. At the same time, even though the DOD planned to fly the crafts less than anticipated, that reduction in flight hours meant the various military branches "are now projecting they will meet most of their affordability targets (i.e., the amount of money they project they can afford to spend per aircraft per year for operating the aircraft)."
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) tossed even more cold water on the F-35's viability. It turns out that not only do the F-35s not age particularly well, they don't particularly offer a competitive advantage over the planes they're supposed to replace.
"As F-35s have aged, their availability and use have decreased," the CBO detailed in a report—"availability" being a measure of "the number of hours that aircraft are both mission capable and in the possession of operational squadrons," as a percentage of that fleet's total flight time.
"The availability and use of F-35s have been lower, in some cases much lower, than those of other fighter aircraft of the same age," the CBO continued. "For example, the average availability rate of a 7-year-old F-35A has been about the same as that of a 36-year-old F-16C/D and a 17-year-old F-22." The fleet's target availability rate is 65 percent, but all three F-35 variants range between 50 and 60 percent.
The F-35 means to replace previous-generation aircraft like the F-16, but instead, the obsolete models are running circles around their intended replacement. (The F-22, like the F-35, is a stealth aircraft, which the F-16 is not; the report notes that stealth crafts "have different maintenance requirements" and lower availability than non-stealth fighters of similar ages.)
Similarly, the F-35B has lower availability, lower usage, and higher operating costs than the Marine Corps' existing AV-88s of the same age—a trend that holds true with the Navy's F-35C when compared to its F/A18s.
The F-35 performs even worse for "full mission availability," a stricter metric that "reflects an aircraft's ability to perform all—not just one or more—of its possible missions. For example, an aircraft with inoperative night vision equipment would not be fully mission capable, even though it could perform missions during the day." On that measure, the F-35 performs dismally, especially over time: "As all three variants of F-35s have aged, their full mission availability rates have declined, on average. For F-35Bs and F-35Cs, only the newest aircraft have generally had full mission availability rates above 10 percent."
Elon Musk, who until recently headed the Department of Government Efficiency, has repeatedly criticized the F-35 as "an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none," and "the worst military value for money in history."
On the other hand, President Donald Trump has called the F-35 "the greatest fighter jet in the world." In March 2025, he announced the U.S. would begin working on its successor, the F-47, which he said would be "built and in the air" before his term ends in January 2029. The House Appropriations Committee's proposed Defense Appropriations Bill for 2026 would spend $8.5 billion on F-35s and $2.2 billion on its "continued development and modernization," in addition to $3.2 billion on the F-47.
The F-35 program began its life in October 2001, just six weeks after the September 11 attacks. In the nearly 25 years since, the jet has proven itself not ready for prime time, both more expensive and less functional than promised. Each new bit of information proves that it's long past time to kill the program.
