F-35 Program Cost Rises to $2 Trillion: Pentagon Projects 74 Years of Operations

A new assessment published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office has confirmed that the cost of the F-35 fighter program to the U.S. Treasury over its lifetime will exceed $2 trillion. Although the cost of acquiring all aircraft planned by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps remains just $445 billion, the operational costs of the fleet over its lifetime has risen to approximately $1.6 trillion. This is the result a combination of factors, the most significant of which are the fighter’s high maintenance needs and costs per flight hour, which were initially intended to be comparable to those of its Cold War era predecessor the F-16. These sustainment costs have become enough of an issue that Pentagon officials have repeatedly indicated it has made the originally planned fleet size unaffordable. Among other costly measures, it has forced the Pentagon to make a multi billion dollars investment to develop a new version of the aircraft’s F135 engine as insufficient cooling on the current version is otherwise expected to add over $38 billion in additional operational costs.

An additional factor in the rise in program costs is that the Pentagon has delayed the F-35’s planned date of retirement to the year 2088, meaning it will be operating F-35s for 74 years. The fighter’s first technology demonstrator first flew in the year 2000. Such a long period in service will be far from unprecedented, with the F-15 Eagle, currently the world’s oldest fighter still in production, having first flown in 1972 and entered service 49 years ago in 1975. With the U.S. Air Force still acquiring newly built F-15s, the class is expected to remain in service for close to 90 years. While a primary factor in the F-15’s longevity is the failure of the F-22 program to produce a viable successor, with excessive maintenance needs and operational costs and a very poor range being among the factors in this, for the F-35 no successor whatsoever has been planned. The fighter is expected to eventually be replaced by unmanned stealth jets, making it potentially the last American manned fighter program depending on the uncertain future of the NGAD sixth generation program currently being pursued. With a lifetime of just 8000 hours per airframe, however, compared to 20,000 hours for new F-15s, all F-35s that have already been produced will be retired long before the 2080s, with the projected retirement date of 2088 indicating that the Pentagon will continue acquisitions for decades into the future.