(archived) https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/22/gao-blasts-contractor-led-f-35-maintenance-as-costly-slow/

GAO blasts contractor-led F-35 maintenance as costly, slow

lots of amazing bits about the F-35 here. I think the "only 55% mission-capable" figure was posted earlier, so I'll focus on some of the other stuff

The backlog of broken spare parts that need fixed has more than doubled since spring 2019, GAO said, from 4,300 to more than 10,000.

It now takes an average of 141 days to repair a broken spare part — far above the F-35 program’s goal of 60 days — and nearly three-quarters of those parts are sent back to the original equipment manufacturer for repair.

Rather than wait nearly five months for a repaired part, GAO said the F-35 Joint Program Office often buys new parts at a higher cost.

holy fucking shit this is literally just a Danger 5 bit

Pentagon officials do not think it’s a sustainable strategy.

yeah no fucking shit, buying an entirely new part every time there's a problem is literally antithetical to the very concept of maintenance

Maintainers told GAO they often can’t do their jobs because they don’t have enough parts or don’t know when they will receive spares. The maintainers identified Lockheed Martin’s supply chain process as the cause. One installation has resorted to “workarounds” to keep F-35s flying with broken sensors when they’re waiting for replacement parts to be delivered, GAO said, but this degrades the jet’s ability to fully carry out its mission.

At some installations, it is common practice for squadrons to borrow support equipment from other squadrons. But when an F-35 squadron deploys and takes most of the installation’s support equipment, that leaves the remaining squadrons “scrambling” to find equipment to maintain the remaining jets. That support equipment frequently breaks, GAO said, and because it is proprietary, contractors must come in to fix it — a process that can take months.

In the last few years, the F-35 program has grown to conclude it can’t afford the current strategy of contractor-led sustainment of the jet.

in any serious country, the phrase "contractor-led sustainment" being mentioned in the context of one of your most strategically important pieces of equipment would be cause for the immediate sacking of a bunch of officials, like how can you leave your national security in the hands of contractors?

Decisions made at the dawn of the F-35 are also coming back to haunt it — particularly the Pentagon’s early decision not to obtain technical data on the fighter from Lockheed Martin, and the considerable amount of concurrency in the program.

Concurrency refers to when a program’s development, testing, production and fielding phases overlap. In the case of the F-35 program, the jet has continued to undergo testing and refinement for more than a decade after the first lot was built and delivered to the U.S. military and international customers.

AAA game development applied to military hardware - just release it a broken mess and patch it afterwards, what could go wrong

There are now at least 14 different versions of the F-35 undergoing work at depots, officials at several locations told GAO.

You know who did this before? The Nazis: "when going through the Tiger reference bible, there were enough changes made during the production cycle that on average, every 6th tank was in some way different to the previous ones". It's like Western countries looked at WW2 German production and decided "this is actually pretty good" and made EVERYTHING into a fucking Tiger tank. The F-35 is the Tiger of planes, those Zumwalt-class destroyers are the Tigers of ships, the PzH 2000 is the Tiger of self-propelled artillery, and so on...

When the F-35 program began, GAO said, the Pentagon thought it would be more cost-effective to have contractors handle the bulk of the jet’s sustainment.

WHY WOULD YOU EVER THINK THAT?! complete "capitalist efficiency" brain, "surely a big government institution like the military couldn't do things efficiently enough"

The acquisition philosophy in vogue at the time of the F-35 program’s launch two decades ago, dubbed Total System Performance, meant the contractor on the program would own it for the system’s entire life cycle

FUCKING WHAT? YOU DON'T EVEN FUCKING OWN THE PLANE

now this is modern media distribution applied to military hardware, where you don't actually own anything but only get to rent a digital copy of it, until the streaming service decides to just get rid of like half the content because they can't be bothered with licensing fees or whatever

Officials at an unidentified depot told GAO that maintenance manuals for some key parts are “ambiguous and rarely are detailed enough for depot personnel to make the repair.” “As a result, depot personnel not only cannot fix the part, but they cannot learn and understand how to fix the part,” the watchdog wrote. ... Training personnel acknowledged to GAO the maintenance training is “poor and inadequate,” adding that because Lockheed Martin runs the training, the firm controls what information is presented to maintainers.

don't you even think about fixing this on your own - that's a violation of our intellectual rights. Fucking John Deere tractor-ass plane

But at one location, F-35 maintainers told GAO that “they have access to so little technical information on the aircraft that they do not fully understand the aircraft or how to troubleshoot common problems.”

using military equipment that your guys don't even fully understand, surely nothing could go wrong

this is particularly funny in light of the news about the F-35 that kept flying on autopilot after the guy ejected - maybe the Air Force genuinely didn't know that something like this could happen, since they straight up don't fully understand how the system works

In one case, maintainers told the watchdog, a unit that had trouble with an F-35′s ejection seat had to transport a contractor by helicopter to a ship to fix the part.

HOLY SHIT LITERALLY THE NEXT LINE