GAO: Pentagon Lacks Complete Records for 26 Million F-35 Parts Worth $31 Billion

The US Department of Defense does not maintain complete records of the approximately 26 million parts it owns under the F-35 program, valued at approximately $31 billion, the Government Accountability Office said in a report published on Monday, November 9, 2026. The parts, which include engines and tires, are held at over 700 contractor- and government-managed facilities around the world, according to the GAO.

The report, titled "F-35 Program: DOD Needs to Strengthen Oversight of Tens of Billions of Dollars in Parts", found that the department has not established procedures that ensure its own records are sufficient to account for and financially report on the parts. The GAO carried out the work in connection with its statutory mandate to audit the US government's consolidated financial statements.

Records in the program's accountable property system of record "remain unreliable", the GAO said: they do not reflect real-time changes and are inaccurate and incomplete. According to the report, the F-35 Joint Program Office has not fully developed procedures to validate the accuracy of the data it enters into that system, and an earlier GAO recommendation on the issue remains open.

The GAO also found that the program office's physical inventory procedures did not adequately verify the existence and validate the completeness of F-35 parts. As of March 2026, the office did not know the status of lost parts valued at over $85 million that the GAO had reported on in 2023, the report said.

On losses at government-managed facilities, the GAO found that the program office has not established procedures for effectively reviewing the reports it receives. Unless it implements procedures for monitoring losses, the GAO said, the office will not know the full extent of losses and its ability "to detect fraud, waste, or theft" will be reduced.

The GAO further found that the office has not established a mature, fully functioning property accountability program that gives its accountable property officers program-specific procedures and training. Combined with the other issues, this will affect warfighter readiness, according to the report.

The GAO made four recommendations to the department. The first, addressed to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment with the F-35 Program Executive Officer and the Defense Contract Management Agency, calls for procedures for monitoring loss reports for F-35 parts, including trend analyses to mitigate future losses. The other three call for F-35-specific procedures for accountable property officers, F-35-specific training for those officers, and a documented structure for the accountable property officer program, covering how many officers it has, where they are located and how much of their time the role takes. The department concurred with all four, the GAO said.

The lost parts trace back to a GAO report published on May 23, 2023. It found that since May 2018 one F-35 prime contractor had incurred losses of over 1 million spare parts totaling over $85 million, of which less than 2 percent had been reviewed by the program office. As of October 2022, the same contractor had not reported over 900,000 spare parts valued at over $66 million to the office for review, according to that report.

The GAO describes the F-35 as the Defense Department's most costly weapon system in history, with overall program costs estimated at more than $1.9 trillion over its life cycle.

The parts pool supports a fleet flown well beyond the United States. According to GlobalMilitary.net's inventory data, which is compiled separately from the GAO's figures, 1,215 F-35s are in service with 16 countries, and 2,203 more are on order across 20 customer countries. The US military's F-35 fleet stands at 724 aircraft in service, with 1,592 more on order. The largest foreign fleets in service are those of Australia with 72, Italy with 57 and Japan with 54, followed by the Netherlands and Norway with 52 each. GMN examined those orders in an earlier look at the F-35 order book.

The four recommendations remain open. The GAO said the department is taking steps toward including F-35 parts on its financial statements, such as developing procedures to value parts with missing cost information; those procedures are under review.