GAO: F-35 Mission-Capable Rate Falls to 25% as Poland Doubles Order

Only one in four F-35s was fully mission capable in fiscal 2025, the Government Accountability Office has found, with the fleet’s full mission-capable rate sliding to roughly 25 percent in a report flagged Friday by Defense News.

The readiness finding landed the same day Poland’s defense minister said Warsaw intends to double its F-35 order from 32 to 64 jets, a procurement announcement that pulls in the opposite direction from the GAO’s headline number and sharpens a debate already underway inside the Pentagon over how much money should keep flowing toward what officials have begun calling “exquisite weapons.”

What the GAO measured

The GAO uses two related but distinct readiness benchmarks. Mission-capable (MC) rate captures the share of aircraft able to perform at least one of their assigned missions. Full mission-capable (FMC) rate is the stricter test: the share able to perform every assigned mission. It is the FMC number — the 25 percent figure cited by Defense News — that watchdogs and operators tend to treat as the truer measure of a fleet’s combat depth.

The fiscal 2025 reading continues a multi-year slide and falls well short of the program’s own targets. The Defense News report attributes the decline to a familiar mix of pressures: a sustainment pipeline that has struggled to keep pace with the fleet’s growth, parts and depot bottlenecks, and a software baseline that has been in transition.

Why FMC is the harder bar

FMC matters because the F-35’s value proposition is breadth. The aircraft is sold and budgeted as a multirole platform — strike, suppression of enemy air defenses, electronic attack, intelligence-gathering, and networked sensor fusion across allied formations. An MC jet that can do one of those missions still counts as available; an FMC jet is the one that can do all of them on a given day.

For commanders building air tasking orders, the gap between MC and FMC translates directly into how many sorties can be planned against how many target sets — and how much workload spills onto legacy F-15s, F-16s and Super Hornets that the F-35 was supposed to relieve. A 25 percent FMC rate means the operational fleet’s full-spectrum bench is thinner than its headline size suggests.

Poland’s bet

Warsaw’s planned expansion lands against that backdrop. Poland already has 32 F-35As on order under its Harpia program. The defense minister’s statement to Breaking Defense — that the country intends to add two more squadrons, taking the total to 64 jets — would make Poland one of the largest F-35 operators in Europe and the anchor of NATO’s eastern air policing posture.

The Polish rationale is geographic. Warsaw shares a border with Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, and Polish officials have argued that fifth-generation airpower is the only credible deterrent against a peer adversary’s integrated air defenses. From Warsaw’s vantage point, the GAO’s readiness numbers are a US sustainment problem, not a reason to delay an order.

”Exquisite weapons” and the autonomy pivot

The procurement-readiness gap is also colliding with a separate debate inside the Pentagon. Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael has publicly floated the prospect that trade-offs against what he has called “exquisite weapons” — manned fifth-generation platforms among them — may be necessary to fund low-cost autonomous systems if the administration’s reconciliation package does not deliver the expected topline. The framing is consistent with the Replicator-style push toward attritable drones, loyal wingmen and software-defined munitions that has been building across the services for two budget cycles.

The GAO report does not, by itself, force that choice. But a 25 percent FMC rate makes the autonomy camp’s argument easier to deliver: if the existing exquisite fleet is generating sorties at a quarter of its theoretical capacity, every additional dollar spent on more of the same buys less combat power on the ramp than the procurement line suggests.

The NATO drawdown angle

The readiness number also intersects with a separate Pentagon planning track. As America Strikes reported earlier today, the department is preparing significant reductions to the US jets and warships dedicated to NATO operations in Europe. If the American footprint thins, allied fifth-generation buys — Poland’s among them — become more, not less, central to the alliance’s air picture. The procurement-readiness gap then ceases to be a US-only accounting question and becomes a coalition-level one: how much of NATO’s high-end air capacity is on paper versus on the ramp on any given day.

That tension is layered on top of an Iran cycle that is still consuming Pentagon bandwidth, from the collapsed leaked-terms episode to the back-channel talks running underneath the ceasefire and the frozen-funds mechanism in Switzerland. Readiness is the constant that runs through all of it.

What to watch

Three threads will determine whether Friday’s GAO number is a trough or a trend.

First, the depot and parts pipeline. The sustainment enterprise — the engine module supply, the spares network, and the depot throughput on the F135 — is the proximate driver of FMC. Any FY26 budget request that does not move those lines materially is unlikely to move the FMC rate either.

Second, the FY26 topline itself. If reconciliation lands and the exquisite-weapons line holds, the Pentagon’s autonomy pivot remains a hedge rather than a replacement. If it does not, the Michael framing becomes operational guidance.

Third, allied orders. Poland’s doubled buy is the most visible vote of confidence in the program this quarter, but it will not be the last. Whether other European capitals follow Warsaw’s lead — or hold back pending clarity on US sustainment — will tell us how the GAO number is being read outside Washington.