The F-35 Is Sold Once and Paid For Until 2088. That's the Whole Business.

An F-35 leaves the Fort Worth line as a single, headline-grabbing transaction. Then it does the only thing a fighter jet is built to do: it gets old, breaks, gets fixed, gets upgraded, and demands parts, software patches, and depot time for the next sixty-odd years. The plane is sold once. It is paid for until roughly 2088. And the bill for keeping it alive dwarfs the bill for building it - the U.S. government's projected F-35 sustainment cost now stands at $1.58 trillion in then-year dollars, a number that has climbed 44% since 2018.⁶ That second number, not the first, is where the defense business actually lives.

The official story is that Lockheed Martin sells fighter jets. It sells fighter jets. It sells a sixty-year obligation that happens to begin with a jet. The platform is the cost of entry; the upkeep is the franchise. Across a weapon system's full life, more than 70% of total cost is incurred not in building it but in sustaining it - the spare parts, the software, the depot maintenance that no one else is positioned to supply.⁸

That is the thesis, and it is worth stating plainly: Lockheed didn't win the F-35 to sell airplanes. It won the F-35 to own the only road back into the airplane for the rest of its life. The catch - and there is a real one - is that owning that road turns out to be far less profitable and far more contested than the tidy version assumes.

Why the jet is the cheap part

The classic move in defense is well documented and almost embarrassingly simple: price the hardware to win the competition, then secure the long-term, more profitable logistics deal that follows.⁸ You don't make your money on the sale. You make it on everything the buyer is structurally unable to do without you afterward. A fighter is not a car you can take to any mechanic. The parts are proprietary, the software is controlled, the depots are certified, and the supply chain runs back through the prime contractor by design. The buyer is locked in not by a contract clause but by physics and certification - the aircraft simply cannot fly without the prime's ecosystem feeding it.

Lockheed's former CFO said the quiet part out loud. On the company's April 2021 earnings call, Kenneth Possenriede told investors that sustainment was going to be the fastest-growing part of the F-35 portfolio - and that it would eventually eclipse both production and development in profitability.⁵ Note the tense. Not 'is.' 'Going to be.' That single verb is the whole honest version of this story: the annuity is an aspiration being engineered, not a fact already booked.

The sale ends. The need never does.

Look at the structure rather than the headline price. A production lot is negotiated, delivered, and over. Sustainment is the opposite shape: it begins the day the aircraft enters service and compounds with every airframe added to the fleet. The installed base is the asset. As of GAO's accounting, the U.S. alone was spending roughly $4.7 billion a year sustaining about 520 aircraft in FY2022 - and the fleet keeps growing.⁶ Every jet that lands becomes a recurring line item for decades. That is why the platform sale, however enormous it looks on the day, is the cheaper and shorter half of the relationship.

The F-35 is already Lockheed's largest program - 26% of the company's total consolidated net sales in 2023, spanning development, production, and sustainment contracts all at once.¹ So the stakes of getting the sustainment economics right aren't a footnote. They're a quarter of the business.

Where the tidy story breaks

Here the razor-and-blades framing starts to fray, and honesty demands we name it. The first crack is that the clean handoff people imagine - production winds down, sustainment swells, margins glide upward - isn't what the filings show. In FY2024, F-35 net sales actually rose about $1.0 billion year-over-year, driven by higher volume across sustainment, production, AND development simultaneously, not by one quietly replacing another.³ The year before told the messier truth in reverse: in FY2023, lower production volume dragged F-35 net sales down by roughly $400 million, which higher sustainment and development only partially offset.² These lines move together and against each other; there is no serene annuity escalator.

The second crack is more damaging to the thesis. A sustainment business is only an annuity if the customer is happy to keep paying. And the customer is not happy. Fleetwide Full Mission Capable rates - the share of F-35s actually ready for all assigned missions - fell from 38% in FY2021 to 25% in FY2025, dragged down by spare-parts shortages, depot capacity gaps, engine issues, and supply chain problems.¹⁰ The very inefficiency that runs up the bill is the inefficiency that triggers Pentagon pushback. Possenriede himself called the current sustainment model 'inefficient.'⁵ When readiness craters, the buyer doesn't pay more gratefully - it restructures contracts, pushes toward performance-based logistics with hard cost ceilings, and in 2025 stood up a $13.7 billion sustainment strategy — the Global Support Solution Reset — to wrestle the problem back.¹⁰ An annuity the customer is actively trying to cap is not the same animal as a toll road.

Isn't this still the best seat in defense?

The fair objection is that all of this hand-wringing misses the forest. Even contested, even inefficient, even with the Pentagon leaning in - Lockheed still owns the road back into a fleet that GAO puts at roughly 2,500 planned aircraft committed to fly for half a century.¹¹ That is a position no challenger can replicate, because no one else holds the certifications, the supply chain, or the data. And the program office's own defense is real: it points to a 34% drop in cost per tail per year (from $9.4M to $6.2M) and a 61% improvement in cost per flying hour (from $86.8K to $33.6K) between 2014 and 2022, both in constant 2012 dollars.⁹ The honest answer is that this is, indeed, a structurally enviable position - and that's exactly why it deserves more scrutiny than the cheerleading version gets.

Two facts keep the position honest. First, the public filings can't actually confirm the headline claim. Lockheed's 10-K does not break out sustainment operating margin separately from production or development inside the Aeronautics segment - so the assertion that sustainment is the most profitable line cannot be verified from the record. It's an aspiration on an earnings call, not a documented accounting outcome.⁵ Second, defense sustainment is not the steady annuity its reputation promises. In FY2024, Lockheed's Missiles and Fire Control segment - which houses sensors and global sustainment programs - saw operating profit collapse 73% on $1.4 billion of losses from a single classified program.⁴ One contract erased most of a segment's profit in a year. So much for the smooth, predictable stream.

The genius of the defense business was never the airplane. It was choosing to stand in the one place every flight hour, every patch, and every replacement part has to pass through for sixty years. Lockheed engineered that position deliberately, and on paper it should print money until 2088. But a toll road only earns when the road works - and right now a quarter of the fleet can't make the trip. The most expensive thing Lockheed owns isn't the jet. It's the promise to keep the jet flying, and the bill for breaking that promise is finally coming due in the same place the profit was supposed to.