Pentagon Cannot Fully Track $85 Million in F-35 Parts

By Daniel Okafor

The Pentagon still cannot establish the status of more than 1 million F-35 parts worth over $85 million, the Government Accountability Office said in a Monday report.

The GAO said the gap stems from failures to maintain parts records at contractor-managed facilities. It remained unresolved as of March 2026, even though the watchdog first flagged the losses in 2023.

The GAO also said the F-35 Joint Program Office could not determine whether more recently reported losses included the parts identified three years earlier.

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program, described as the most expensive weapon system program in history, carries persistent spare-parts, acquisition, sustainment-cost and readiness problems, the GAO said.

Why did $85 million in parts disappear from view?

Contractor records form the missing link. The GAO found that poor recordkeeping left the F-35 Joint Program Office unable to determine the status of more than 1 million parts worth over $85 million.

Because the 2023 losses remained unresolved and newer loss reports could not be matched to them, the watchdog said the program office lacked a dependable way to distinguish old losses from new ones. The result leaves historical losses inside every later reporting cycle.

The problem also limits the Pentagon’s ability to determine which replacement parts it needs and in what quantities, the GAO said. Inaccurate inventories can obscure shortages before they affect aircraft maintenance.

How does the $31 billion inventory system fail?

The F-35 Joint Program Office’s Enterprise Logistics Management System, or ELMS, sits at the center of the problem. The GAO said ELMS draws on a mix of data sources and does not reflect real-time changes or current parts status.

The key technical break is the system’s inability to connect directly to prime contractor systems. That prevents ELMS from consistently reconciling government holdings with records maintained at contractor facilities.

The JPO had not entered roughly 17,000 parts undergoing maintenance or repair into its official system as of March 2026, the GAO found. Those parts carried an estimated value of about $1.3 billion.

DoD officials told the GAO that the figure could reach $2.5 billion once the department included transportation and overhead. The omissions therefore conceal more than the cost of the physical components.

“The data are not reliable for asset accountability or financial reporting,” the GAO report said. “Timely and accurate data on F-35 parts are also important to ensure that the F-35 program is positioned to meet the needs of the warfighter.”

The Pentagon owns roughly 26 million F-35 parts with an estimated value of $31 billion, the GAO said. The inventory resembles reconciling 700 warehouses against one register, because no direct interface keeps contractor records synchronized with ELMS.

Government-managed facilities hold about 70% of the parts. Contractors store the remaining 30%. Since 2020, the JPO has spent at least $17 million conducting physical inventories at both types of facilities, but the GAO found those efforts did not adequately resolve the underlying problems.

Can new controls restore accountability?

The GAO said DoD will lack accurate information about the location, value and number of its F-35 parts until contractor interfaces operate and effective data-validation procedures take effect. The department concurred with the watchdog’s recommendations.

A JPO spokesperson told Business Insider that the department was implementing specific actions to monitor and analyze parts-loss trends.

“The JPO is actively developing program-specific procedures and tailored training for Accountable Property Officers (APOs), alongside a detailed plan to define and structure the APO program,” the spokesperson said.

Those measures target the two main failures identified by the GAO. They must replace unreliable contractor data with validated records and give officials clear responsibility for parts held outside government facilities.

What does the parts gap mean for readiness?

The GAO regularly reviews the F-35 program. Earlier this year, the watchdog reported that the mission-capable rate, the share of time an aircraft was available to perform one mission, fell from 67% in fiscal 2021 to 44% in fiscal 2025.

The full mission-capable rate, which measures the percentage of time an F-35 can perform all its missions, declined from 38% to 25% during the same period.

The US military operates three versions of the stealth fighter. The F-35As support conventional runways, the F-35Bs can use shorter runways and land vertically, and the F-35Cs serve aircraft carriers. The variants support air-to-air combat, ground attack, surveillance and electronic warfare.

The GAO identified a lack of spare parts as one cause of lower readiness, alongside maintenance problems. The Department of Defense launched a $13.7 billion readiness plan last year to improve aircraft availability by the end of the decade, but the latest GAO report warned that the investment could cost more than expected.

The practical test is whether the JPO can connect contractor systems, validate data and correct missing maintenance records before those gaps distort the readiness plan’s parts forecasts.