Key Points and Summary – The F-35 is the planet’s best fighter precisely because it is more than a fighter: a stealthy, fused-sensor “quarterback” that speeds decisions and enables others to strike.
-The eye-popping $2 trillion figure reflects life-cycle realities—fleet scale, decades of software (TR-3/Block 4), engine upgrades, and hard sustainment work—not just unit price.
A new F-35A Lightning II fifth-generation fighter aircraft flies over the Alaska Canada Highway en route to its new home at the 354th Fighter Wing, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, April 21, 2020. The F-35 represents a new model of international cooperation, ensuring U.S. and Coalition partner security well into the 21st Century. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. Adam Keele)
-Variant divergence (A, B, C), global partners, data rights, depots, and mission-data labs add cost but deliver interoperability.
-Israel’s F-35I Adir performance in the 12-day war shows why the bill is worth paying.
-The smart path forward involves cutting O&S through reliability growth, faster software development, and depot depth investments.
The F-35 Stealth Fighter’s Problem Is Also Its Point: Why the World’s Best Fighter Costs So Much
Repeat after me: please stop attacking the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The plane is literally the backbone of the U.S. military and has already proven its worth in combat—more on that in a sec.
Call the F-35 what you like—fifth-gen, multirole, stealthy—but the label pilots keep coming back to is “quarterback.” It’s not just a jet; it’s a flying information architecture that sees first, sorts first, and lets everyone else shoot straighter. That talent isn’t abstract.
This spring’s 12-day Israel–Iran war put the F-35I Adir at the center of an incredibly complex air campaign: penetrating contested airspace, surveying kill boxes, passing a pristine picture across the force, and enabling weapons from other platforms to land on time and on target. It was precisely the job designers intended.
And yet, for all that elegant combat performance, the public conversation keeps getting lassoed by a single number: roughly $2 trillion over the program’s full life to build, field, fly, fix, upgrade and finally retire the fleet.
Eye-watering? Absolutely. But to understand why, you have to stop thinking about the F-35 as a “plane” and start thinking about it as the backbone of Western tactical airpower for the next half-century—with all the digital plumbing, global supply chains, and software evolution that implies.
U.S. Air Force aircraft participate in a capabilities demonstration in honor of the U.S. Air Force’s 75th Anniversary at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, Aug. 12, 2022. Aircraft, including F-35A Lightning II, F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-22 Raptor aircraft, participated in the 75-fighter jet formation. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Timothy Moore)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: what makes the F-35 so good is precisely what makes it so expensive.
The $2 Trillion Headline—And What’s Hiding Inside It
Let’s begin with the number that launches a thousand hot takes. When the Pentagon and its partners talk about “$2 trillion,” they’re quoting the program’s total life-cycle cost in then-year dollars from the mid-1990s through the late 2080s. That sum includes research and development, procurement, military construction, spares, manpower, fuel, depot work, software sustainment, upgrades, and the inflation baked into nine decades of spreadsheets.
The slice that stings most isn’t the shiny jets rolling off the line; it’s the operations and sustainment (O&S) bill that piles up year after year. In other words, most of the money isn’t for buying the F-35—it’s for having it.
Why so high? Three blunt reasons:
Scale. This is the largest single air-system procurement in U.S. history, with thousands of aircraft planned across U.S. services and allied fleets. Even modest per-tail annual costs explode at fleet scale.
Duration. The design premise isn’t “build it, freeze it, fly it.” It’s continuous modernization through the 2030s, 2040s, and beyond. That means an unending software pipeline, electronics refreshes, and weapons integration campaigns.
A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II aircraft flies during the Heritage Flight Training Course at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, Feb. 28, 2025. The F-35 is designed to provide the pilot with unsurpassed situational awareness, positive target identification and precision strike in all weather conditions. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jasmyne Bridgers-Matos)
Concurrency. The program deliberately overlapped development, production, and sustainment to field capability earlier. That move saved time up front and imposed costs later in retrofits, requalification, and re-test when upgrades arrived.
Stack those three, and the $2,000,000,000,000 sticker stops looking like a single “price” and more like the running cost of air dominance over multiple generations.
Three Airplanes, One Brand: How Variants Drive Cost
The F-35 badge covers three very different machines:
F-35A for the Air Force—conventional takeoff and landing, the lightest and cheapest to buy and fly.
F-35B for the Marines—short takeoff/vertical landing, with a Rolls-Royce lift fan grafted into the fuselage and a swiveling exhaust, forcing deep structural compromises to make the magic work.
F-35C for the Navy—larger wing and tougher gear for catapults and carrier traps, plus folding surfaces and corrosion hardening.
(July 6, 2025) A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II aircraft assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 242, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, takes off from the flight deck of the forward-deployed amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6) while conducting flight operations in the Coral Sea, July 6. America, lead ship of the America Amphibious Ready Group, is operating in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations. U.S. 7th Fleet is the U.S. Navy’s largest forward-deployed numbered fleet, and routinely interacts and operates with allies and partners in preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Sam McNeely)
In a perfect world, the three variants were going to be largely common, unlocking economies of scale and slashing unit costs. In reality, mission and environment matter, and commonality eroded where physics refused to cooperate. The STOVL B-model in particular demanded unique structure, plumbing, and thermal management, rippling changes through the supply chain and sustainment enterprise. The C-model’s carrier life added its own bills for fatigue margins, landing loads, and salt-air survivability.
Commonality is still real (the engine core, radar family, mission system software, many avionics), but the corners where it mattered most for cost were exactly where each service needed something different. And remember: while the U.S. Army doesn’t fly F-35s, the jet is engineered to integrate with Army sensors, fires, and command networks; those joint-force interfaces add requirements even when a fourth U.S. service isn’t buying airframes.
The Brain Is The Bill: TR-3, Block 4, and The Software Gravity Well
Stealth shaping and materials are only half the story. The thing that makes the F-35 a “quarterback” is sensor fusion and battle management—the aircraft’s ability to inhale data from its AESA radar, Distributed Aperture System, EOTS, EW receivers, and datalinks; then render a single, coherent picture; and finally share that picture while staying hard to find. That demands compute, and compute demands upgrades.
A U.S. F-35A Lightning II departs after conducting aerial refueling with a KC-10 Extender from the 908th Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron, June 11, 2019 at an undisclosed location. The fifth generation fighter provides the pilot with comprehensive situational awareness in a sphere around the aircraft for missile and aircraft warnings, day and night vision, extended range detection and precision targeting against air and ground threats, granting the U.S. Air Force and its allies’ air superiority. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Keifer Bowes)
Two acronyms matter:
TR-3 (Tech Refresh 3): a major jump in processors, memory, and displays—the digital horsepower needed to run tomorrow’s software.
Block 4: a long arc of added weapons, electronic-warfare modes, sensors, and algorithms that truly exploit fifth-gen networking.
Neither has been easy. TR-3 hit software instability and supplier delays, stalling deliveries for months and forcing a workaround where jets were accepted with training-use software pending full combat capability. Block 4, meanwhile, expanded in ambition even as schedules slipped; the latest official timelines push full Block 4 maturity into the next decade.
Frustrating? Sure. But you can’t get to the “quarterback” part without building and feeding the brain. Cutting those investments would certainly make the jet cheaper. It would also make it less F-35.
The Sustainment Iceberg: Where Money Disappears
If you want to know why O&S dominates the ledger, walk into a hangar. You’ll find the cost pillars you rarely see in a flyover:
Reliability and Spares. Early fleets suffered parts that didn’t last as long as advertised—especially in the harsh thermal environment created by tightly packed systems and stealth coatings. Reliability growth is real; the bill for getting there is also real.
A pilot from the 34th Fighter Squadron conducts pre-flight preparations in the cockpit of an F-35A Lighting II on the tarmac at Santa Maria Airport, Calif., during Bamboo Eagle 24-3. During Bamboo Eagle, the 388th Fighter Wing is functioning as a force element at a “spoke location,” providing fifth-generation airpower to a larger force operating in the eastern Pacific region. The spoke locations are smaller than an airbase, a cluster of tents, a small footprint of equipment and personnel. (U.S. Air Force photo by Micah Garbarino)
Logistics IT. The original ALIS maintenance system tried to predict and pre-position parts—with mixed results and plenty of downtime. Its successor, ODIN, is leaner, faster, and more secure, but still a work in progress. Smoother code saves money; writing it costs money.
Data Rights and Depot Depth. Governments want organic ability to repair and modify; industry wants to protect IP and recoup investment. Sorting out who can fix what, where, and with whose data sets the pace for depot stand-up around the world—and for how fast broken jets get back to the line.
Manpower and Training. A fifth-gen fleet burns pilot and maintainer training at prodigious rates. High-fidelity simulators, secure mission-data labs, and continuous software drops all add cost that never shows up in a glamorous unit price.
Mission Data Files. This is the invisible “weapon”—library files tailored to specific theaters that let the jet recognize and rank threats instantly. Building and validating them demands classified labs, exotic test ranges, and exquisite intel. No line on a contract says “omniscient,” but that’s what the customer expects—and pays for.
Add in engine overhauls (more on that in a moment), outer-mold line maintenance to keep stealth coatings within spec, and the fuel/crew/consumables churn of daily sorties, and you’ve explained why the lifetime bill dwarfs the purchase price.
Capt. Andrew “Dojo” Olson, F-35 Demonstration Team commander and pilot performs a dedication pass in an F-35A Lightning II during the 2019 Wings Over Wayne Airshow April 27, 2019, at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. The WOW Airshow marks the third public performance of the F-35 Demo Team’s new aerial demonstration during 2019 airshow season.
The Engine Question: Heat, Growth, and A Long Game
The F-35’s F135 engine has been a workhorse—but the jet’s expanding electrical and thermal loads (think new sensors, hotter processors, and directed-energy ambitions down the line) have eaten into margin. The Pentagon debated a radical replacement—a new adaptive-cycle engine—but chose an evolutionary Engine Core Upgrade (ECU) path instead. That decision threads the needle between performance, risk, and cost: upgrade the core, keep the rest, and avoid ripping open three variants to shoehorn in something entirely new.
There’s no free lunch, even here. The ECU demands its own development and retrofit plan; depots must tool up; and fleets must cycle through the upgrade while meeting real-world tasking. But it’s cheaper and faster than a clean-sheet engine—and it buys back the thermal and power headroom Block 4 expects to spend.
“But Unit Price Is Down, Right?” Yes—and That’s Not The Whole Story
You’ll see headlines about A-model unit prices around the low-$80 millions, with the B and C variants higher. That’s a huge improvement from early lots, reflecting learning curves, supplier stabilization, and negotiated savings. It’s good news.
It just isn’t the news that drives the lifetime bill.
A modern combat aircraft’s acquisition cost is the cover charge. The real money is in decades of flying, fixing, upgrading, and staying ahead of threats that are improving just as fast as you are. When political debates fixate on “price per jet,” they miss the decisions that actually move the cost needle: reliability growth, supply-chain resilience, depot capacity, software cadence, and common-config discipline across a global fleet.
An F-35A Lightning II, assigned to the 388th Fighter Wing, at Hill Air Force Base, UT, flies in formation with a Belgian Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon on Sept 10, 2022, Kleine Brogel Air Base, Belgium. The F-35 Demo Team consists of approximately 15 total Airmen to include the pilot and commander, pilot safety officers, superintendent, team chief, maintenance Airmen, aircrew flight equipment specialists, and public affairs personnel. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Thomas Barley).
The Global Program: Savings From Scale, Pain From Diversity
The F-35 is built for, with, and across allies. That brings economies of scale and interoperability that no fourth-gen upgrade can match: common training, common parts, common tactics, and the ability to share a sensor picture seamlessly across national lines. It also brings diversity—different climates, maintenance cultures, basing concepts, and political appetites for upgrades. Each partner fleet spawns national mission-data labs and sometimes national integration projects (weapons, radios, crypto), which are good for sovereignty and complicate sustainment.
Net-net, allies make the airplane more affordable to buy and smarter to fight—and they make it harder to manage. That management challenge is a cost driver no spreadsheet can perfectly predict.
Why Israel’s War With Iran Is The Best Case For Paying The F-35 Bill
When Israel went to war with Iran, the F-35I Adir’s job wasn’t to be the star. It was to open doors, light the room, and let everyone else walk through. That meant likely lethal missions—strikes on protected targets and sensitive nodes deep inside Iran. But the bigger impact was architectural: F-35Is stitched together an air picture across hundreds of aircraft, managed electronic warfare moves, and time-on-target sequencing that let fourth-gen shooters and standoff weapons land blows in rhythm.
F-35I Fighter from Israel. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
F-35I Adir High in the Sky. Image Credit: IDF/Creative Commons.
F-35I Adir Israel Stealth Fighter. Image Credit: IDF
That is what “quarterback” means in practice. It also clarifies the cost argument: a cheap jet that can’t do that job would be expensive the first night of a real war. You’d pay the bill in attrition, missed targets, and lost initiative.
So Why Didn’t We Just Build A Cheaper ‘Good Enough’ Fighter?
We did. They’re called F-16s, F/A-18s, and the modernized fourth-generation fleets that many air arms still fly—and will continue to fly for years.
They are superb, and they are out of their design era when the fight turns high-end: dense air defenses, distributed kill webs, and enemy electronic warfare that punishes anything loud, hot, or late.
The F-35’s value is not that it can pull 9Gs or throw a long bomb. Its value lies in making the entire force faster, quieter, and smarter—shrinking the time from “I think” to “I know” to “we hit”. That is a software problem as much as an airframe problem, which is why the program’s biggest headaches are also its most necessary investments.
How To Tame The Bill Without Gutting The Jet
There are honest levers that reduce lifetime cost without un-F-35-ing the F-35:
Relentless reliability growth on the top ten cost-driving parts (the “bad actors”), measured not in PowerPoint but mean time between failure on the flight line.
Depot and supplier diversification so a single bottleneck can’t sideline multiple fleets—especially for coatings, canopies, and engine modules.
Israel F-35I Adir Stealth Fighter. Image Credit: IAF.
Faster software pipelines with stable baselines so squadrons aren’t trapped between incompatible loads, and so test points are ruthlessly prioritized to get upgrades into cockpits quicker.
Real data rights frameworks that let government depots fix what they’re best at, while industry sustains the high-risk items—and both sides share the data to catch problems early.
Configuration discipline that avoids a proliferation of bespoke national variants. Sovereignty matters; so does an affordable global fleet.
None of those is glamorous. All of them chip away at the O&S mountain—the part of the $2,000,000,000,000 that actually matters.
The F-35 Paradox, Resolved
The F-35 is the best fighter in the world not because it out-climbs or out-sprints rivals, but because it out-thinks them—and helps the rest of the force do the same.
That is exactly what Israel demonstrated in the most demanding real-world test any fifth-gen fleet has faced. The price of that brain—measured in TR-3 work, Block 4 churn, engine upgrades, and sustainment discipline over decades—is the price of staying the best.
The 461st FLTS, F-35 Integrated Test Force, at Edwards Air Force Base in California received a newly instrumented F-35A aircraft. The unique airframe will boost flight and mission sciences testing for the warfighter at a critical time during developmental test. “This new aircraft arrives at a crucial time, supporting intensive testing of TR-3 software upgrades and next-generation weapons integration.” says Lt. Col. Daniel Prudhomme, F-35 ITF director. “As the world’s only F-35A capable of evaluating both mission systems and flight sciences, this new asset is key for rapidly fielding advanced capabilities to the warfighter.” (Courtesy photo)
If you want a cheaper airplane, you can have one. If you want a cheaper air war, you buy the one that sees, fuses, shares, and survives. That airplane costs more at the factory and less on the battlefield.
That’s the F-35 bargain. It isn’t a small one. It is, however, the right one. And that’s why I still say this is the best fighter on Earth. Period.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) is Editor-In-Chief and President of National Security Journal. He was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
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