Pentagon cannot fully track $31 billion of F-35 aircraft parts, GAO finds

Watchdog finds serious gaps in F-35 inventory records

The Pentagon cannot reliably account for a pool of roughly 26 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, which are valued at an estimated 31 billion dollars, according to Tom's Hardware reporting on a Government Accountability Office study released this week. The watchdog described the current inventory system as outdated, inaccurate and incomplete.

The parts are stored across about 700 government and contractor sites around the world. Tom's Hardware notes that technology capable of managing inventories on this scale has been available for decades, yet the Defence Department still lacks a dependable way to monitor its stock.

The F-35 is the most expensive weapon system in history, with lifetime costs estimated at 1.9 trillion dollars. The GAO says the department has long-standing shortcomings in how it accounts for and reports on the jet's components.

Millions lost, thousands untracked

The scale of the problem goes beyond bookkeeping. More than 1 million parts, worth over 85 million dollars, are believed to be lost or missing. In addition, roughly 17,000 parts sent away for repair, with a combined value the report puts at up to 42.5 billion dollars, are not being tracked at all.

These figures come from the GAO analysis as reported by Tom's Hardware and Stars and Stripes. A spokesperson's caveat applies: the watchdog bases its estimates on the department's own records, which it says can be inaccurate and incomplete, so the true numbers may differ.

A mishap that shows the stakes

The report arrives weeks after an incident that Tom's Hardware suggests may illustrate the weakness of the current system. In September, a UPS worker re-routed a shipment of classified F-35 components through Hong Kong, apparently to save time.

The parts were then allegedly taken by China. According to the report, an employee is thought to have missed an email warning that the shipment should not be diverted. The chain of events points to both a communications failure and a gap in accountability procedures.

Tom's Hardware treats the link between the incident and the inventory problems as suggestive rather than proven, and the alleged theft itself remains unconfirmed in official detail.

Repeated warnings, minimal progress

This is the third GAO report on F-35 parts since 2019, and the newest one complains that the Defence Department has made minimal progress on earlier advice. For example, a 2022 recommendation to carry out regular physical counts of parts has still not been put in place, Stars and Stripes reports.

There is also no reliable procedure for checking data supplied by the prime contractors that hold much of the inventory. The watchdog has offered possible solutions, but the implication is that readiness and reliability of the world's costliest fighter fleet may be affected by these management shortcomings.

What the Pentagon says it is doing

According to Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon is building what it calls a live connection for the F-35 Joint Program Office, linking its own inventory software with that of the prime contractors. The office says it is modernising its infrastructure with direct real-time interfaces.

A Joint Program Office spokesperson told Breaking Defense that the integration directly addresses earlier system gaps and is meant to ensure seamless accountability of F-35 spare parts. Whether these changes satisfy the watchdog will likely be judged in a future review.