The United States Government Accountability Office has found that the Pentagon cannot reliably account for its F-35 spare parts inventory, a fleet of roughly 26 million components valued at approximately $31 billion held across more than 700 facilities worldwide. Report GAO-27-108713, published on 9 November 2026, sets out the scale of the problem and the risks it creates.
A Record System That Cannot See the Whole Picture
Known as ELMS, the Enterprise Logistics Management System serves as the F-35 programme's official property record. The fundamental problem is architectural: ELMS has no direct connection to the separate property management systems operated by prime contractors Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney. Any official relying solely on ELMS is therefore working from records that are incomplete by design.
The data that does enter ELMS through the joint spares pool arrives via quarterly contractor submissions, so as Air & Space Forces reported, some figures can be over three months out of date before they are acted upon. Around 30% of parts are held at contractor facilities and 70% at government-managed sites, Air & Space Forces reported, spread across those 700-plus locations.
What the Data Looks Like When It Arrives
The reliability of what does get submitted to ELMS raises further questions. Serial numbers appeared in just 29% of records within a December 2025 contractor submission, according to The Aviationist, while National Stock Numbers, the standard identifiers used to track military components, were present in only 43%. When those identifiers are absent, any attempt to match a database entry to an actual physical part becomes fundamentally unreliable.
The Aviationist also noted that close to 6% of records in that same submission carried acquisition costs of $0.01 or below, figures that point to placeholder entries or data errors rather than genuine pricing. The cumulative effect is a property record system whose contents cannot be consistently cross-checked against physical assets.
A further GAO finding, reported by The Aviationist, concerns the standing of one prime contractor's property management system: the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) had already given it a disapproved rating, meaning government auditors had identified its processes as inadequate before the current report was even released.
$1.3 Billion in F-35 Spare Parts Off the Books
One dimension of the accountability shortfall is particularly striking in scale. Roughly 17,000 components currently undergoing maintenance or repair, with a combined estimated value of around $1.3 billion, had not been entered into ELMS as of March 2026. While those parts remain somewhere within the supply chain, they are entirely invisible to the official record system for as long as work on them continues.
Even the $31 billion headline figure for the total inventory is probably understated. According to Air & Space Forces, JPO financial officials informed the GAO that certain parts are either excluded from the overall total or absent from records altogether, which means the true worth of assets that cannot be properly accounted for may well exceed the figures already published.
Fraud, Waste and Theft
The GAO's own language in the report is direct about what poor visibility enables. The report states: "Unless it implements procedures for monitoring losses, F-35 JPO will not know the full extent of losses of F-35 parts, and its ability to mitigate losses in the future will be decreased, reducing its ability to detect fraud, waste, or theft."
Counting up what is there has itself proved costly. From fiscal year 2020 onwards, the JPO has committed no fewer than $17 million to physical inventories across contractor and government-managed facilities, a sum that illustrates how much resource has already been poured into a problem that remains unresolved. The Defense Contract Audit Agency had set a target of March 2027 for finishing the first comprehensive inventory of F-35 parts, as of June 2026.
For context on how allied nations are approaching fifth-generation and advanced fighter programmes independently of the F-35, our coverage of Indonesia's expected acquisition of Chengdu J-10 fighters and Saab's proposed Gripen assembly line in Canada reflects the degree to which some partners are diversifying away from US platforms. Readers interested in the broader F-35 industrial picture can explore further through our Manufacturer Search.
The Bottom Line
The GAO report presents a programme managing an inventory the size of a small national defence budget with record systems that are structurally disconnected, populated with incomplete data and not yet fully inventoried after decades of operation. The March 2027 deadline for the first full inventory is the next concrete milestone to watch. If the JPO implements the monitoring procedures the GAO is pushing for, the picture may improve; if the deadline slips, the accountability gap will persist into another budget cycle.
This article draws on reporting by The Aviationist and Aviation A2Z.
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