F-35: $2.5 Billion in Spare Parts Gone Missing

Remember the F-35 incident in which parts of the American fighter jet, shipped from Australia to the United States, abruptly turned up in Hong Kong? A new report from the US Government Accountability Office suggests the Pentagon doesn't always know where the spare parts for the most expensive weapons system in its history are sitting, even in ordinary times. But what the report says differs sharply from the versions circulating online.

What the GAO Found

The report, published on November 9, examines the shared pool of parts that the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps draw on, along with foreign customers. It covers roughly 26 million parts worth about $31 billion, held at more than 700 government and contractor sites worldwide. The supply chain includes more than 1,900 American and 2,100 foreign suppliers, and 19 international customers also operate the aircraft in its various versions.

Of that pool, about 17,000 parts, valued at an estimated $1.3 billion, were missing from the Pentagon's records as of March 2026. Once incomplete pricing data and other costs are factored in, the figure could reach $2.5 billion. A separate problem dates to 2023, when the GAO found that one of the main contractors had written off more than a million parts, worth over $85 million, as losses between 2018 and 2022. Three years later, the F-35 Joint Program Office still doesn't know what happened to them.

What "Lost" Means

It is worth pausing here. In official documents, "lost" does not mean "stolen" or "physically vanished." The term also covers damaged and destroyed parts, but the government is still obliged to establish what happened, who is responsible and how the write-off was recorded. Most of those 17,000 components were undergoing maintenance or repair and simply had not been entered into the Enterprise Logistics Management System (ELMS). The report states explicitly that they cannot be considered physically missing, but their absence from the records makes reliable accounting impossible.

The million parts from the 2023 story don't look like a single disappearance either. About 940,000 of them, worth more than $66 million, were never handed over to the government for review. The contractor later submitted loss reports totaling $28 million for 2012–2025, and the contracting agency deemed it financially liable for roughly $6 million. But the program office kept no record of unresolved cases and could not determine whether the $28 million was part of the original $85 million.

Why It Keeps Happening

The causes are largely technological. ELMS can track changes in real time, but it doesn't connect to the property management systems of Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney, a problem known since 2022. As a result, data on the shared pool arrives quarterly, and some records can be more than three months out of date. The program office is also unable to validate the data it receives before entering it into the system. In the December data extract, only 29% of records included serial numbers, while 43% carried supply system numbers. Nearly 6% of parts had a purchase price of one cent or less, which points to data errors.

Even physical inspections haven't solved the problem. Since fiscal year 2020, the office has spent at least $17 million on them, yet the latest inspection did not confirm that every part was actually where it should be. Halting operations at hundreds of sites for a full recount is impractical. GAO Director of Financial Management Asif Khan acknowledged that the total number of lost parts cannot be estimated, because no procedures exist for monitoring losses. Discipline is also lacking: of 57 loss cases entered into the tracking spreadsheet by April 2026, 24 were filed more than a year after discovery, even though the deadline is 30 days.

The Hong Kong Episode

The claim that parts are "leaking en masse to adversary countries" through corruption appears nowhere in the report. Breaking Defense notes that the GAO did not link the Hong Kong episode to the accounting problems. That case involved a shipment from Australia that was bound for repair in the United States and ended up in Hong Kong. According to available reports, it included a canopy and a weapons bay door with radar-absorbing materials. An October report suggests the cause may have been a missed shipping notification. Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles acknowledged the incident but disputed claims that sensitive equipment had been lost. The Pentagon confirmed an investigation and efforts to recover the parts.

The two stories, then, are connected only by a shared atmosphere of distrust in record-keeping. One shows that cargo can be lost in transit. The other shows that the government cannot verify how many spare parts it has in the first place. But neither the auditors nor journalists have any evidence that the parts in the GAO report fell into the hands of adversaries, and the theory about "senior administration figures" remains an unsubstantiated rumor.

What Is at Stake

The practical cost is measured in combat readiness. According to a separate June audit, the share of aircraft able to perform at least one mission fell from 67% in fiscal 2021 to 44% in fiscal 2025, while fully mission-capable rates dropped from 38% to 25%. Poor record-keeping cannot explain these declines entirely, but inaccurate records make it harder to locate parts and to calculate procurement needs.

The expensive program itself is also in question. The Pentagon plans to invest about $13.7 billion in sustaining the fleet through 2031, including more than $7 billion for spare parts. Without an accurate inventory, the GAO warns, the department risks buying what it already has while failing to find what it urgently needs. In July, the Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a $1.6 billion contract for additional spare parts.

The Pentagon agreed with all four of the GAO's new recommendations. Of 34 earlier F-35 recommendations, 26 remain unimplemented. The Defense Contract Audit Agency is preparing a full inventory by March 2027, and the program office says it is building direct data links with contractors. The 2024 defense spending law requires the department to obtain a clean audit opinion by the end of 2028.