About a year ago, I wrote a poast about the catastrophic levels of readiness – or lack thereof – of the American F-35 SOOPER DOOPER AWESUMSAUCE AMAZEBALLS!!!! all-singing, all-dancing wunderwaffe. For the very, VERY few who do not know what this colossal shitheap and waste of money actually is, I recommend working your way through all of the Didactic Turducken menu.

Basting the Turducken

In that poast from last year, I pointed out the Turducken has staggeringly bad levels of fleet readiness. But it was not until Grandpa Grumpuss brought to our attention the true scale of the problem, by highlighting a Government Accountability Office report, that many of us had the data available to understand the real predicament the American armed forces face right now.

Here is Mr. Martyanov’s excellent video, for those who prefer a funny Russian accent with a grumpy paternal way of speaking:

The report itself is simply shocking. There is no other word I can think of to describe its contents appropriately.

If you have the time and ability, I recommend reading through roughly the first 25 or so pages of the report. The GAO lays bare a litany of problems with the Turducken that are so severe, and so troublesome, that I am amazed anyone still thinks this flying shitheap is even remotely useful.

And, as we shall see very shortly, the adjective, “flying”, is not actually particularly applicable either.

I have taken the graphs you see in the set below directly from the GAO’s report, linked earlier. I have not altered the images in any way, except in terms of scaling and size – click on any given image to enlarge it.

Let’s start with this one:

Figure 6 from the report, on p24, shows the difference between the target and actual repair metrics for Turducken components. The stated goal for the program is 60-90 days for complete repair of any given component of the aircraft – that includes the entire Depot Repair Cycle Time (DRCT). This is the total time taken for ALL of the following to happen:

• Reporting of the fault by pilots or ground crews;
• Removal and delivery of the faulty component or part from the aircraft to the repair depot;
• Actual repair, testing, certification, etc.;
• Delivery of the fixed component or part back to the ground crews;

Based on the definition provided in the report, I do not believe this includes time taken to install the failed component back into the aircraft, but never mind that.

As you can see, the average DRCT, as of a year ago, is still 140 days – more than double the baseline of 60 days, the upper bound of high performance maintenance and turnaround.

Think what this means in concrete terms. Suppose an aileron on an F-35A goes wonky. It would take, on average, 140 days – OVER THREE MONTHS – for the intricate web of Lockheed Martin subcontractors and systems maintenance crews to fix the thing and deliver it back to the airbase for installation.

And now think about what that means in terms of the actual realities of combat.

Let’s not kid ourselves – shit BREAKS in wartime. Soldiers are the best people in the ENTIRE WORLD at breaking things, even – perhaps especially – things that are supposedly designed to be indestructible. They are more capable of breaking things than ANY 2-year-old – it’s literally in their training to do it.

The F-35 is NOT designed to be indestructible. It is in fact an extremely fragile piece of equipment. When it breaks, it REALLY BREAKS. Even today, well over 15 years into the active service life of the aircraft, there are HUNDREDS of serious bugs and issues with the aircraft, and that is before we get to the hardware problems.

This is not an aircraft built for serious use under combat conditions. It never was. And the figures prove it.

This naturally leads to the next major question – how much of the F-35 fleet, as a whole, is actually ready and available for serious combat-level operations?

The answers start with Figure 9 in the report, and they are horrifying:

The report states this comes from the availability of spare parts on installations housing F-35s. Out of 15 installations surveyed, officials at 10 of them stated that just keeping the Turducken maintained and flying is a serious challenge, just because there are not enough spare parts available. The goal is to have 90% of the F-35 fleet ready to perform missions, whether at “partial” or “full” levels of mission capability.

As you can see from the figure above, NOT ONCE in the last 4 years has the FUSA been able to achieve that level of readiness with the F-35 fleet.

Next, take a look at the readiness levels of different variants of the F-35, in Figures 16-25. You can see the mission-capable rate, and full-mission-capable rate, across a wide variety of measures:

What does all of this tell us?:

• The F-35s built between 2008 and 2011 have almost ZERO full-mission-capable rates, regardless of when you look at the fleet;
• F-35Cs are the most reliable of the aircraft, generally speaking – which may have more to do with the fact that the Navy has imposed restrictions on its use at full performance, such as not permitting pilots to throttle up to supersonic flight, as this would destroy the stealth coatings and surfaces on the aircraft;
• F-35Bs have ABYSMAL rates of fleet and mission readiness, due in large part to the well-documented technical issues and problems with the integrated lift fan system in the aircraft, which is far too large, complicated, and unwieldy for its own good;
• The overall F-35 mission-capable ready rate is no more than about 55% at present, and has declined precipitously over the last few years;
• The full-mission-capable rate is nothing short of APPALLING – no more than a third, roughly speaking, of the entire fleet, is actually capable of performing its missions at full readiness;

The key statistic to consider, does not appear in the GAO report. It comes from the Banderastan War.

Do you know how many missions the Russian Aerospace Forces conduct, on average, every day, with the aircraft they have on hand?

The answer is WELL INTO THE HUNDREDS.

EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

There have been times when the Russian ВКС has managed to fly over 1,200 sorties IN ONE DAY.

This is a level of operational tempo that the FUSA cannot match. None of its NATO allies can come anywhere close to the FUSA’s own abilities to field aircraft. It is a level of operational art the West has not been able to achieve since the First Gulf War.

It is, of course, important to note that Russian and American operational tempos are not directly comparable. The Russian numbers count ALL sorties, by ALL warplanes, of ANY kind – to include Su-34 and Su-25 ground attack and support aircraft; Su-27, Su-30, Su-35, Su-57, and MiG-31 air-superiority and interceptors of all variants; all ground-support helicopters of any kind; Tu-22, Tu-160, and Tu-95 strategic long-range bombers; and all other relevant aircraft in Russia’s arsenal. It is NOT a 1:1 comparison.

But, if you take the closest Russian analogues that can do everything the F-35 can – the Su-35S, the Su-57, or even the Su-34 and Su-34M, at a pinch – then you will quickly understand that the Russians are capable of flying more aircraft, more of the time, longer and more frequently than America can.

And THAT is the real scary part of this report. It means that if the FUSA went to war with Russia, it would not have the aircraft required to sustain a serious air campaign for more than a few weeks, at best. Despite its much larger air forces, and despite being primarily an air and naval power – not a land power – the FUSA would find its entire fleet of F-35s grounded very quickly, due to a lack of available spare parts, and due to the extreme wear-and-tear on the airframes and fleet.

The Russians, by contrast, would be able to continue bombing and striking US forces stationed in Europe, anywhere on the continent, from behind the safety of their vast supply lines and immense network of available military installations, maintenance depots, and repair facilities, using either their aerospace forces, or their stand-off strike capabilities.

It bears repeating that AMERIKHASTAN HAS NO DEFENCE WHATSOEVER against Russian hypersonic missiles, like the Kinzhal – which can now be launched from the Su-34M, not just the MiG-31K or the Tu-22M2 – or the Tsirkon. The latter can now be launched from Bastion land-based defence systems, which gives ZERO warning to air defence radars and systems of any airborne launch platforms.

The PATRIOT PAC-3 is useless against hypersonic missiles – Ukie propaganda notwithstanding. The THAAD is no better. There is NO DEFENCE against what the Russians can bring to bear.

And that is before we get to the Russian integrated AD systems, which appear to have achieved a level of success of well over 90% in shooting down Western-made strike missiles and Ukrainian drones.

Now, at this point, some defenders of the F-35 might like to try to point out the Turducken’s stealth capabilities, which would supposedly allow it to sneak around near the Russian lines and spot targets, then transmit the data back to American forces to pick off at long range.

There is one huge problem with that logic.

Recently, the Americans apparently sent an F-35 over Ukrainian territory to snoop around the Russian front lines and collect data. The Pentaloons absolutely denied this – and the link you see is to the English-language version of Pravda, so make of it what you will. However, the comments are from the Defence Minister of Singapore, and I know from personal experience that the Singaporeans are not stupid about such things. They are a very close ally of the FUSA in the Pacific, and depend on the Americans for their military hardware. One of their senior ministers would not say such a thing without reason.

It so happens that I know, from my own sources, who have sources in current service, that such a mission DID occur.

And the F-35 in question got pinged NEARLY TWENTY TIMES by Russian radar.

In other words, the Russians KNEW damned well the F-35 was there. They KNEW, and simply locked on to it and the pilot in it, to demonstrate that they knew what was going on.

They were sending a message:

The F-35 is visible to them, no matter the variant, and they have everything they need to shoot it down.

Nor are the Russians the only ones. Apparently, the Iranians are able to find the “fingerprint” of every unique F-35 that they encounter – they can distinguish between different F-35s easily, and track them, and therefore shoot them down.

In summary, then, this is a plane that not only “can’t climb, can’t turn, can’t run” (to quote military ANALyst David the Ass) – it can’t FLY either, because it literally doesn’t have enough spare parts to fly. Which means that, in the event of a serious shooting war, the Americans have almost no ability to fight within a few weeks, if not DAYS, against a serious opponent.

The fact that the FUSA has spent nearly US$2 TRILLION on this piece of crap, only to get a fighter that isn’t even AVAILABLE most of the time, is an absolute travesty. It is also a sign of a decaying and broken empire in the throes of terminal collapse.