Pentagon spent at least $17 million counting F-35 parts and still cannot fully account for the inventory

The Pentagon still cannot fully account for roughly 26 million F-35 parts worth about $31 billion, the Government Accountability Office said Monday. The finding lands as the military plans a $13.7 billion expansion of the fighter’s global support system—raising a basic accountability question: why commit more money before officials can establish what they already own, where it is and who bears responsibility when parts are reported lost?

GAO’s November 9 report says records across more than 700 contractor and government facilities are outdated, inaccurate or incomplete. About 30 percent of the parts are managed by contractors and 70 percent by the government, but the Joint Program Office does not maintain a complete, reliable property record for either category.

One gap is concrete. As of March, about 17,000 maintenance and repair parts were absent from the Enterprise Logistics Management System, according to GAO. The program valued them at about $1.3 billion, though an alternative estimate put the total as high as $2.5 billion. An absent database record is not proof that a part is physically gone; it is proof that the program cannot use its principal system to account for it.

The program has paid at least $17 million for physical inventories since fiscal 2020, but those counts still did not capture all parts. GAO said officials also relied on a prime contractor’s property system even after the Defense Contract Management Agency rated that system “disapproved,” making its data high risk for inaccuracy.

The control failure extends down the supply chain. Defense officials and contractors did not know the locations of every sub-subcontractor facility holding F-35 property. As of August, the program office did not have a date for receiving the full facility list, GAO said.

Monday’s report also shows that earlier loss warnings remain unresolved. In 2023, GAO found that one prime contractor had incurred losses of more than one million parts worth over $85 million; about 940,000 of those parts, worth roughly $66 million, had not been sent to the accountable property officer for adjudication.

By March 2026, the prime contractor had submitted about $28 million in losses dating from 2012 through 2025, and the Defense Contract Management Agency had so far assessed about $6 million in contractor liability. The program office could not determine whether that $28 million overlapped with the $85 million previously identified because it had not kept the record needed to reconcile them.

Even the loss paperwork was tracked in an ad hoc spreadsheet. Of 57 cases, seven lacked a unit cost, 24 cases worth almost $400,000 were submitted more than a year late despite a 30-day requirement, and two were reported incorrectly. GAO said the program did not systematically monitor incomplete forms or analyze loss trends.

The Pentagon’s response is not that the problem is imaginary. The Defense Department concurred with all four GAO recommendations and said it was developing F-35-specific procedures, training and an accountable-property-officer plan. Those steps could repair the controls if officials complete them and test whether they work; the report does not establish that the fixes are already operating.

As DOD implements the $13.7 billion Global Support Solution Reset, the observable tests are straightforward: a complete inventory baseline, a verified list of every storage location, reconciled loss cases and documented decisions about contractor liability. GAO said the faulty accounting produced an unquantifiable material misstatement in the fiscal 2025 financial statements and contributes to the department’s disclaimer of opinion.