The U.S. Air Force Has a Maintenance Problem

The Air Force is experiencing surging maintenance delays, with 74 percent of aircraft missing their depot completion deadlines—up from 31 percent in 2019. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reveals that the true extent of these readiness delays has been masked by officials altering target timelines after discovering unplanned maintenance. The unplanned surprises found when aircraft are in the Air Force’s depots for maintenance aren’t being reflected in the statistics that the service uses in the assessments of depot maintenance.

A GAO Report States The Air Force Isn’t Meeting Deadlines

This latest report shows that the Air Force “is not reporting the full extent of depot maintenance challenges and may not be able to make accurate comparisons across the fleet,” the GAO says. Air Force maintainers have masked the delays because officials often revise their target timelines after unplanned work is discovered. These unplanned delays are hurting the service’s aircraft availability for training and operations. Air and Space Forces magazine reports that, “Depot maintenance is the highest, most intensive level of military maintenance, covering repairs requiring the overhaul, upgrading, or rebuilding of parts or structures, according to U.S. law.” The Air Force has three major maintenance depots:

• Ogden Air Logistics Complex at Hill Air Force Base, Utah
• Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia
• Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma

What Are The Primary Factors In The USAF’s Maintenance Delays?

Several systemic challenges drive this Air Force maintenance crisis. The Air Force has an aging aircraft fleet, with age-related wear and tear on highly complex aircraft making them more susceptible to unplanned repairs and a critical shortage of skilled technicians. Making matters worse, the Air Force has masked the true severity of these bottlenecks by shifting target deadlines to match the actual, slower performance of its maintenance depots.

An Aging Aircraft Fleet Presents Constant Challenges

Surging unplanned maintenance is a direct result of the aging of its air fleet. As aircraft age, depots routinely uncover unexpected issues like corrosion or structural stress cracks during routine maintenance. This unplanned work has increased significantly, making it difficult to stick to the original schedule. The masked metrics in the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that nearly three-quarters of Air Force aircraft experienced delays. However, the scale of the problem was hidden because officials regularly revised target timelines after unplanned work was discovered, making it appear as though depots were meeting their goals.

The Air Force’s Losing Battle Against the Private Sector

Workforce shortages are reaching critical levels. Maintenance depots struggle with critical staffing challenges because the Air Force can’t compete with the private sector on pay and benefits. The Air Force’s challenge of recruiting and retaining engineers and mechanics has been constant. The GAO Report highlighted, “The depots have taken some steps to mitigate this challenge by selectively using incentives and emphasizing the nonfinancial benefits of a federal career. “However, the Air Force has not fully addressed pay competition with the private sector because DOD has not conducted a comprehensive assessment of pay gaps for occupations affected by private sector competition. “Such an assessment would enable the depots to make informed decisions to address competition with the private sector for occupations critical to aircraft readiness.”

Creating A Pathway For Recruitment

A recent article in War on the Rocks suggests that to address maintenance workforce issues, the Air Force should launch a targeted recruitment campaign in high schools and technical schools that emphasizes service career opportunities and benefits. “Streamlined pathways for obtaining certifications, such as an Airframe and Powerplant (A&P), can make the Air Force more appealing in an increasingly competitive hiring field. Tying these certification programs to service commitments can ensure a steady influx of qualified maintainers.”

Supply Chain Issues Plague All Of The Services

Supply chain and parts delays aren’t just an Air Force problem but a Pentagon-wide issue. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) lost thousands of vendors (roughly 22 percent of its total supplier community) over recent years, which has drastically increased pricing and lead times. However, complex aircraft, such as the F-35 and F-22, require highly specialized parts, technical training, and logistical support systems, and these systems have struggled to keep pace. Primary factors include contractor shortages, reliance on foreign-sourced parts, and cyber vulnerabilities. The USAF is actively mitigating these risks using AI

and predictive logistics frameworks.

Having the “right stuff at the right place at the right time” in the Pacific theater is “a little bit of a maths problem,” says U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s strategy director for logistics and engineering. “Hawaii is 3,000 miles from the West Coast. Guam is 5,000 miles from Hawaii, and the first island chain”—which includes Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines—“is 1,500 miles from Guam,” Brig. Gen. Jim Bliss of the New Zealand Army said this month during the Indo-Pacific Security Forum. It’s “a vast ocean,” with “very, very little in the way of logistics nodes on land forward available to be used,” Bliss said. If troops and materiel aren’t “forward when the fighting starts,” it will be difficult to get them there in time, he said. It’s a problem that preoccupied many U.S. military leaders in the region. “Here in the Indo-Pacific, a robust domestic base is a hollow shell if we cannot project that power across the tyranny of distance,” said Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, during a keynote speech at AUSA’s Land Forces Pacific conference. “We cannot win if our supply lines are 5,000 miles long.”The U.S. Army’s “delivers foundational sustainment capabilities to the entire joint force. And I’m fervent in my belief that nobody knows or senses or feels viscerally the scale of sustainment than our nation’s Army,” Indo-Pacific commander leader Adm. Samuel Paparo said at LANPAC.

Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, commander of the Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command, reiterated that point later in the conference. Pre-positioning equipment forward, with partners like the Defense Logistics Agency and Army Materiel Command, and building what the Army calls joint interior lines, “quite frankly, demonstrates our ability to overcome that 7,000-mile distance” from the continental United States to “where we think we need to operate.” Noting that he’d “rather get a root canal” than have to import things into Australia, Gardner said the Army has been prepositioning equipment there on a significant scale. Still, he said, the issue is not just “storage and distribution,” it’s also about the ability to repair things when they break—without sending them back to the continental United States. “We don’t want to” send it back, Gardner said. “We want to repair it forward. We want to repair it forward now, in what I call ‘competition’” so it’s ready when a conflict or crisis emerges. In the past, he said, the unit had to send a broken Army watercraft to the U.S. West Coast. But because of expanded contracts, “now, I can fix it in South Korea. I could fix it in Japan. I could fix it in the Philippines. I could fix it in Australia. I could fix it in Singapore. “That may sound like a small thing, but you know, that towing of a ship—two years in a row—all the way back from Australia—two years in a row—it takes a long time. That’s a 30-day sail in order to get it back,” he said, referring to the annual Talisman Sabre exercise.

Such a delay is untenable, USFK’s Brunson said. “We cannot shuttle broken equipment across an ocean for repair while an adversary evolves on our doorstep,” he said. On the Korean peninsula, Brunson said, “we’re already fixing forward and improving the concept.” Korean dry docks have “successfully overhauled” three U.S. ships, with two more in the queue. And by “leveraging special repair authority and weaponizing advanced manufacturing, we’re transforming our theater blueprint into a permanent deterrent.” Resilience “is no longer a support function, but has to be a warfighting function,” said Marine Maj. Gen. George Rowell, INDOPACOM’s director of strategic planning and policy. “It means sustaining combat power, command and control, and logistics, and being able to take hits in a degraded environment.” The way forward, Rowell said, is to “supercharge our defense industrial base,” and “innovate with non-traditional primes.”

[“prime” is in reference to “prime contractor”, the traditional ones would be your major MIC companies like your Lockheeds and Boeings, so this would be about looking into other companies - and of course, classic business bro bullshit of believing that enough “innovation” is going to magically solve your deindustrialization]

“China possesses over 50 percent of the global commercial shipbuilding capacity, while the U.S. has about 0.1 percent, making it imperative that we accelerate capacity through both established and emerging industrial partners.” A day after Rowell’s keynote at the Indo-Pacific Security Forum, Paparo told the audience at LANPAC that Allied forces won World War II “because industry built combat power at scale, a scale that the Axis powers could never match. And American sustainment delivered, from the factory floor to the fighting positions across the globe.” Now, Paparo said, “we set the theater,” by posturing forces and pre-positioning sustainment, and creating “a network of distribution centers” throughout the Indo-Pacific. But, he said, “we’ve got to be smart about how and where you’re pre-positioning ammunition stocks, because in this 21st-century warfare environment, you must [protect] those things that can’t be moved, and you must always be moving the things that you can.”

MOVE THEM TO WHERE, FUCKING AQUAMAN’S CELLAR!?

and also, protect them with what, all the air defense missiles you just used up against Iran?

Marine Maj. Gen. Matthew Mowery, deputy commander of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, said the Marines set a goal of being able to sustain their own forces for 45 days within the first island chain. But he can’t build up an “iron mountain” of equipment and supplies. And ultimately, Mowery said, “If we think that…if and when deterrence fails, and a crisis goes to conflict, we think we’re going to have 45 days to bring in, you know, all of our equipment sets and bring those forces in—we have not been kidding ourselves, but we would be kidding ourselves. If you don’t have those forces here when the shooting starts, you’d better plan to live without them.” Maj. Gen. Ash Collingburn, commander of the Australian army’s 1st Division, echoed Mowery later that week. “If it’s not forward when the fighting starts, then it’s really hard to get” needed supplies and people forward, he said. “I see sustainment as the key challenge in the theater—across time, across distance, across contested lines of communication. If we want to campaign at the edge, we need to be able to sustain.”

The United Kingdom has long maintained an active military presence in the Mediterranean. In February, the Royal Air Force (RAF) dispatched six F-35B Lightning fifth-generation stealth fighters to Cyprus as part of its efforts to bolster the defensive readiness of British sovereign base territories and assets amid rising tensions in the Middle East. The short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35 was deployed from RAF Marham, joining the approximately 10 Eurofighter Typhoon fighters stationed at RAF Akrotiri on the island in the eastern Mediterranean. Another pair of British F-35s is now on the Azores islands, but it isn’t part of a planned deployment. Instead, the aircraft have been stuck at Lajes International Airport since their arrival on March 9, 2026.

Two US-Made F-35s Didn’t Quite Make It Across the Atlantic

How the two F-35Bs managed to become stranded is almost comical, and London could take it as a sign not to move forward with additional acquisitions of the US-made stealth aircraft. The two fighters were part of the final batch of Lot 17 fighters scheduled for delivery to the UK in March. Five aircraft departed from Lockheed Martin’s factory in Fort Worth, Texas, and set out for RAF Marham, but just three completed the journey. All five stopped in the Azores, which serves as a refueling and staging base for US and NATO aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Two aircraft experienced technical faults and have remained at Lajes awaiting repairs. Of course, there are worse places for a military aircraft to go on vacation. The islands, which have been described as a mix of Hawaii and Iceland, are known for their scenic beauty, so pilots likely have no problem making a stopover for a day or two to rest and recover. A decades-old bilateral treaty with Portugal even covers US activity at Lajes. Last December, the former Danish F-16 Fighting Falcons that were sold to Argentina also made a stopover in the Azores. However, no one expected that the UK’s brand new F-35s would be essentially stuck on a lasting holiday on the islands. This also comes just a year after a British F-35B, operating from the flagship aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales during the Operation Highmast mission to the Indo-Pacific, was forced to divert to Thiruvananthapuram International Airport in India due to mechanical problems. The aircraft remained at the base for five weeks in June and July 2025, eventually flying back after repairs were completed at the airport. Just weeks later, another F-35B operating from the flattop diverted to Kagoshima Airport in south-western Japan after experiencing an in-flight malfunction.

…

The RAF Is Having Second Thoughts About New F-35s

The UK acquired 48 F-35Bs, but with the loss of aircraft ZM152 from HMS Queen Elizabeth in November 2021, the official number of operational F-35s stands at 47. However, according to July 2025 data from the UK’s National Audit Office, only about one-third of the fleet is currently considered fully mission-capable. Those numbers are even worse than those of the United States Air Force’s fleet of F-35As, the conventional takeoff and landing variants, which had a 67.15 percent mission-capable rate in 2024. The problem is made worse in the UK, as the RAF and Royal Navy lack the spare components needed to keep the aircraft flying. “The intensive demands of Operation Highmast, the 2025 Indo-Pacific deployment, had already consumed significant engineering effort and spare parts reserves,” the UK-based Navy Lookout reported, and added that the surge for the deployment required that spares be stripped from RAF Marham to ensure the 24 F-35Bs assigned to the carrier could be maintained accordingly. “The surge to 24 F-35Bs exceeded the designed capacity of the carrier’s Afloat Spares Pack, which was only sized to support 12 aircraft,” the report noted.

There has been speculation that the RAF would place a follow-up order for at least 27 F-35Bs to bring the fleet up to 74 aircraft, but some British lawmakers have pushed back on the planned acquisition. The mishaps last year and the fact that a full order can’t be delivered accordingly are certainly black marks against the UK buying even more F-35s. However, the UK doesn’t have many options. It may still move forward with an acquisition of the F-35A, which can restore the UK’s capability to deliver a US-owned B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb as part of NATO arrangements, explained Aerospace Global News. Finally, the UK remains committed to the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with its partners, Italy and Japan, to develop a sixth-generation manned fighter. Critics of the F-35 have called for redirecting funding to the domestic GCAP rather than the American F-35 program.