The most costly aspect of a modern fighter is usually the aspect that does not actually leave the ground. In the field of military aviation, the math that was once quietly languishing in sustainment spreadsheets, is now openly influencing the decisions made in fleets. According to a projection prepared by Oliver Wyman, the growth in sustainment costs per year will be 1.1 percent to 2036, which is 11 times the rate of growth of the past decade, as more advanced fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft all over the world are put into service. It is structural, in that complexity ceases to be a capability advantage, but a long-term bill, which accrues more rapidly than many force planners anticipated.
There is no program that is that focused on that tension as the F-35. A Government Accountability Office estimate of 2024 pegged the fighter lifetime program cost at 2 trillion, which is related to service-life extensions, inflation, and increasing sustainment burden. Fuel or flying hours are not as much a driver of those demands as are the realities of stealth coats, software-intensive mission systems, sophisticated avionics, and engines that run on tight tolerances and systems that demand specialized effort, low depot capacity, and parts pipelines that are not operated in the same way as in the supply chains of the legacy era.
The pressure is enhanced by upgrade schedules. The reporting of GAO has also followed the modernization of Block 4 which has been largely associated with Technology Refresh 3 hardware and software expansion and is now extending long beyond what was intended. Completion of Block 4 under that accounting will not likely take place before 2031 and the reorganization of the program diminishes some of the certainty of operators attempting to match up budgets, training programs and mission-ready set-ups. In the case of air arms that procure only the bare minimum to be able to do high-end air combat, delays become important since the ability is never bought at once: it is transported as an object of chase over decades of upgrades, rework, and configuration control.
The sustainment story now includes production and delivery performance as opposed to being an independent chapter. Delays in the delivery associated with TR-3 maturity and parts supply, including trends of delayed aircraft and engine deliveries were described by GAO. Arriving late (or even requiring later retrofit) new aircraft have an added planning pain on operators: they have to operate mixed configurations, training limits, and maintenance bases that are no longer the same as those within the same tail number family.
In Southeast Asia, where recapitalization is gaining rapid ground, that tension is stoking a more general diversification phenomenon. The increasingly in serviceable fleets of the region encounter the issue of operational obsolescence within the networked, information-centric air operations, and the question of replacement is more about affordability over the entire life cycle, rather than headline performance. The addition of 12 additional FA-50s by the Philippines explains the appeal of a platform that is presented as a step-up that is affordable and still capable of integrating with U.S. products and concepts of operation. Korea Aerospace Industries has packaged FA-50PH capability along with the expanded capability of precision-guided munitions, increased range and endurance, and enhanced network interoperability-incremental capability development that is more affordable to constrained sustainment budgets.
Even comparisons amongst the fighter category that can be afforded by the masses accentuate how sustenance has turned out to be a determinant variable. There were estimates in Europe of aircraft such as the Gripen and F-16V against the F-35A that demonstrated a general increase in the cost-per-flight-hour assumptions, and the difference between manufacturer bases and national ministry projections reveals how sensitive the results are to methodology, utilization rates and includes and excludes what is counted as support infrastructure.
It is not that the advanced fighters are not to be desired; it is that air power is being re-priced in sustainment. With modernized fleets the center of gravity is now moving away as procurement milestones to the engineering realities of maintaining the software-defined aircrafts mission-capable year after year.
