That information is vital to determine how effective the program truly is. Luckily, other federal agencies provided some of that information. The Government Accountability Office included them in a July 2021 report. The GAO found that the entire F-35 fleet averaged a full mission capable rate of 39% in 2020, which was an improvement from the 32% the year before. The Air Force’s F-35A variant performed the best with a fleet average of 54% that year, a rate of performance that is still far below the 80% mission capable rate needed for an effective aircraft fleet (and even significantly below the program’s low 65% availability standard). The Marine Corps’ fleet of short takeoff and landing F-35Bs and the Navy’s fleet of F-35Cs, which are tailored for use on aircraft carriers, lag far behind. The F-35B fleet’s full mission capable rate got worse between 2019 and 2020, dropping from 23% to 15%. The F-35C fleet showed some improvement during that period, but that is not saying much. That fleet’s rate went from 6.4% to 6.8%.
The rest is equally eye-opening.
Yep, the bells and whistles don’t help with reliability.
So, buying 3 times the planned number will help a lot (we’re done with developing new weapons, so that’s off the table). Buying 10 times the planned number, of course, would actually give us a bit of offensive capability.
...of course that all presupposes that Russia will sell us the Titanium and China will sell us the chips and rare earths...and God only knows what other components we need our enemies to supply.