The Army would deploy more Lockheed Martin-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to test new technologies and capabilities under the House’s proposed 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.
An amendment proposed by Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., and passed on a voice vote Wednesday, would increase the number of developmental test F-35s in the works from six to at least nine, adjusting a provision passed as part of the NDAA for fiscal year 24.
Wittman’s amendment to the annual defense policy bill would also require the test F-35s to come from the 18th batch of jets. That would be ahead of the NDAA’s FY24 schedule, which saw the six test F-35s come from the 19th lot.
Wittman’s amendment would also give the Army more flexibility in deciding which F-35 variants — the Air Force’s conventional take-off and landing F-35A, the Marine Corps’ short-take-off, vertical-landing F-35B and the Navy. and the Marine Corps’ F-35C that can land on aircraft carriers – will be used as developmental test jets.
The FY24 NDAA required the Pentagon to use two of each variant as test jets, but the latest proposal would make no such requirements.
The House Armed Services Committee advanced the proposed $883.7 billion bill to the full House on Wednesday after a 12-hour recess.
Wittman, chairman of the panel’s Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, has often spoken about what he sees as a need to increase the number of test F-35s to perfect upgrades such as Technology Refresh 3. The F-35 program struggles to complete TR-3, the latest set of hardware and software improvements. The effort is now about a year behind schedule.
TR-3 is facing software issues and delays in production of key parts, and a Government Accountability Office report earlier this month said testing officials reported the software remains unstable.
Since July, the Pentagon has been refusing to accept deliveries of the latest F-35s from Lockheed Martin due to the delays with the TR-3. An undisclosed number of these aircraft are stored at Lockheed facilities, primarily at the Fort Worth, Texas, plant, but GAO warned in its May 16 report that the company may run out of space to store undelivered F- 35’s to park.
GAO also raised concerns about the testing capacity of the F-35 program, which now has aircraft that are more than 40 years old and that tend to break down.
Four more F-35s will undergo modifications and become test aircraft by 2026, but GAO said testers would have to use workarounds and could not conduct all the external weapons tests that some F-35s would need.
The proposed NDAA for FY25 would reduce the Pentagon’s planned F-35 purchase by 10, directing the roughly billion dollars in savings to expanding the jets’ testing capacity, including by purchasing more test aircraft.
Wittman told reporters this month, after the committee published its bill, that the F-35 program’s testing capabilities are in urgent need of improvement and are long overdue. He said the inability to invest in sufficient testing infrastructure has directly led to problems, such as the TR-3 delays.
GAO also raised concerns in its report about the timeline for introducing new developmental test F-35s. The six jets already in the works would not have been prepared to conduct test flights until 2029 at the earliest. And plans to retire existing test F-35s, GAO said, would have left the F-35 program without test jets in 2028 and part of 2029.
Lockheed Martin said testing of the latest version of TR-3 is ongoing and expects the jets to work well enough to resume deliveries in the third quarter of 2024. But even if the military accepts delivery of those jets, they would likely only be able to fly training missions and would be unprepared to conduct combat operations until 2025.
