These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
Are the military services babying the F-35 to obscure its true costs while continuing to get enormous sums of taxpayer funding for a plane that has consistently failed to live up to performance expectations?
From the very beginning, the F-35 program has been plagued by hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns and repeated schedule delays.
Moreover, even as promised capabilities have been delayed by well over a decade, billions poured into fixes haven't resolved ongoing reliability issues, crippling its operational effectiveness, and rocketing the program cost to over $2 trillion dollars — 400% more in inflation-adjusted dollars than its 2007 Government Accountability Office estimate.
The plane’s extreme unreliability has resulted in full mission capable rates (FMC) of only 36.4% , 14.9%, and 19.2% for the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C, respectively. For F-35Bs and F-35Cs, only the newest planes have full mission availability rates above 10%.
Unsurprisingly, the services and Lockheed Martin don’t really like to talk about FMC; instead, they like to focus on mission-capable (MC) rates of roughly 50%. While much lower than the 90 percent promised by Lockheed Martin and its service partners, it certainly sounds much better than the dismal FMC rates. But MC is a very deceptive measure, and the services know it, as “mission capable” aircraft need only be capable of flying non-combat missions, such as training, ferrying, or public relations, etc.
But the MC deception is only part of the equation when it comes to just how little bang-for-the-buck taxpayers are getting for their dollar.
Strong circumstantial evidence, coupled with emerging data and the services’ long history of stonewalling when it comes to problems associated with major programs, suggest that the U.S. military services , as well as prime contractor Lockheed Martin, have been babying the F-35s to obscure just how unreliable and expensive they would be if not being nursed along.
This coddling of the F-35 lowers some costs and pushes other costs into the future, keeping current year expenses as low as possible. This makes the program look like it is more efficient and effective than it really is, improving the chances of selling and delivering more F-35s while decreasing the chances the program will be curtailed or even canceled.
There are three major drivers of wear and tear on an aircraft like the F-35: how many missions (sorties) it carries out, how many flight hours it accumulates, and how it's flown during a mission.
Missions/Sorties are the best predictors of maintenance-related costs. While accumulated flight hours are often discussed when it comes to aircraft age and maintenance, studies have shown that the number of sorties, on average, is a better predictor of the wear and tear on an aircraft. This is because each sortie involves the stresses of taking off and landing, as well as subjecting the engine to thermal cycles, the primary culprit when it comes to engine wear.
Once the plane is flying, its wear is minimal unless subjected to aggressive maneuvering and engine use. Hence, when it comes to minimizing wear, for the same number of flight hours, fewer sorties of longer duration will produce less wear than more sorties of shorter duration, 100 two-hour sorties vs. 200 one-hour sorties.
Flight hours and operating costs. While in most cases, the number of sorties will be a better predictor of when maintenance will be required, more flight hours still equal more maintenance. So, if you can keep the hours down, the absolute cost of maintaining the plane will be less. For context, modern fighters like the F-16 routinely flew 250–350 hours per year in their prime, but F-35s average only about 195 hours annually — well below their original targets of 250–316.
To note: the June 2025 Congressional Budget Office found that F-35 availability and hours being flown are “lower, in some cases much lower, than those of other fighter aircraft of the same age.” Interestingly, even at 17-years of age, legacy aircraft such as F-16s and F-15s blow away the mission readiness of brand-new F-35s, even though they are flying more hours annually.
Indeed, we know the hours flown each year by the F-35A and F-35B declined markedly over the first seven years of their lifetimes. This means aircraft just a few years old are being flown less than brand new planes and consequently being subject to less daily wear and tear, conveniently pushing the cost of replacing engines and other expensive depot-level work down the road, even as the services continue to buy new F-35s under what some, including myself, would call false cost metrics.
But beyond cost shifting, overall fewer hours being flown means less in-the-air training “stick time.” And while flight simulators are helpful, there is no substitute for training in a real plane, being subject to real flight forces. Sadly, due to unreliability and cost per flying hour, F-35 pilots are not getting the stick time they need to truly excel.
How the planes are flown during sorties matters. While the services do not typically report how the planes are actually being operated during a sortie, babying vs. pushing it to the limits of its airframe and engine will dramatically impact how much maintenance is required. Due to operational security concerns, exactly what non-combat operational limits are placed on the pilot and his plane is not available. But we do know now that there are very tight limits on how often and how long the F-35B and F-35C are permitted to go supersonic due to the damage done to their stealth coating and perhaps even structure during supersonic flight.
F-35 retrofits and upgrades kick costly engine overhauls down the road. By building and fielding aircraft even before final designs were complete, the F-35 program took concurrency to a level never seen before. This multibillion-dollar concurrency experiment resulted in an unprecedented number of retrofits and hardware modifications for early batches of F-35s — work that can take more than a year to complete for each affected plane. But while the plane is offline, it isn’t being used, so again, any necessary engine overhaul and associated maintenance costs will be kicked like a can into the future.
Consider a brand-new F-35A delivered to an Air Force squadron. In its first few years, it is assigned to training units where it generates many short-duration sorties of 1.5 hours or less, while generating over 200 or more flight hours per year. From there, it gets assigned to an operational squadron, flying fewer sorties of longer duration, but still racking up enough hours not to have a big negative impact on the fleet-wide average. Reduced sorties mean less monthly maintenance costs and less wear on the engine.
Then in year five and six, it undergoes refits and rework that take it out of service for a total of 12 months. While out of service it is not contributing hours and sorties, but it also is not putting wear on its engine, pushing a multi-million dollar engine overhaul out by another year. This cost shifting makes the program look better than it is. By year eight it is flying just over 150 hours per year, while the Air Force is counting on newer planes to keep the averages up.
While this kind of micromanagement can reduce maintenance costs due to fewer sorties and hours, it also shifts major costs into the future and depends on new planes to maintain average flight hours and sorties at a high rate. Once new planes stop entering the fleet, the number of hours and sorties pilots will be able to fly will have to be reduced to keep costs from going through the roof.
Ultimately, due to legitimate operational security (OPSEC) concerns, the services won’t reveal full details on how the F-35 sorties and hours are being micromanaged or limitations and restrictions on how F-35 pilots are allowed to operate the aircraft. But we do know that the 2024 CBO report adjusted overall estimated sustainment costs for the F-35 program from $1.1 trillion to $1.58 trillion, while stating F-35s will be flying 21% less hours going forward due to reliability issues.
This is exactly what one would expect from the kind of cost shifting pattern we have described. What’s more, we can be sure sophisticated opponents like China and Russia have seen this report and have doubtlessly conducted in-depth analysis exposing the F-35’s inability to conduct high-tempo operations over a sustained period against a peer competitor, who, unlike opponents such as Venezuela and Iran, will regularly create situations in which we aren’t controlling the timing and tempo of our responses.
This lack of robustness also ensures that our pilots are shortchanged in skills development relative to what they could count on from a more reliable fighter.
By micromanaging F-35s, the true depth of their shortcomings can be concealed/minimized, helping to sustain support for a program diverting enormous resources from potentially more effective alternatives. It’s time to stop wallowing in sunk cost emotionalism and put a stop to buying planes whose reliability and costs make them a national security liability.
This article is the latest installment in our Quincy Institute/Responsible Statecraft project series highlighting the writing and reporting of U.S. military veterans. Click here for more information.
This under-the-radar story from academia should concern anyone who cares about deterrence.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close all six of its area-studies centers in 2026. Whatever the local budget logic, the national security implication is straightforward: when universities dismantle language and regional expertise, the United States shrinks the “farm team” that produces the deep knowledge we later insist is indispensable in moments of crisis.
Much of that pipeline has historically been underwritten by federal Title VI programs, including the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships.
Political scientist Michael Desch reminds us why that pipeline matters. In his account of how universities supported U.S. strategy, he notes that “area studies … proved to be invaluable to policymakers” during World War II. Language and culture are not a nice-to-have. They are wartime enablers that cannot be conjured after a crisis begins.
Desch also makes the pipeline point sharply: the “deep historical, cultural, and linguistic expertise” the U.S. government needed as it faced the Cold War “could only come from universities.” When a flagship university closes the centers that build that expertise, it is not just an academic rearrangement. It is a strategic self-inflicted wound.
That erosion of area expertise is not confined to campus. Inside the Defense Department, the institutions that build and sustain regional expertise are also being treated as convenient bill payers. In a summer 2025 update, the Marine Corps’ International Affairs Program (IAP) — the community that manages Foreign Area Officers (FAOs), Regional Affairs Officers, and Foreign Area SNCOs — reported that DoD-level working groups were discussing major changes to language training at the Defense Language Institute, including the possibility of moving some language learning outside Monterey.
The same update flagged broader turbulence in regional education at institutions like the Naval Postgraduate School and warned that funding reductions were already shaping what the program could do.
What does this all mean in practice? The IAP newsletter highlighted an October 2024 visit to Norway by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric M. Smith. A delayed flight collapsed the schedule, and Capt. Sydney Murkins, a Marine FAO at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, delivered a condensed brief between engagements so the commandant could still get the essentials — who matters, what the sensitivities are, and what can go wrong without proper context..
Senior leaders are briefed nonstop on global issues, but rarely have time to absorb the bilateral political and military dynamics of every partner; FAOs bridge that gap with trusted, context-rich insight.
That kind of expertise is built through training — and, critically, sustainment. Yet sustainment is being cut. The IAP update reports that joint FAO sustainment courses hosted by George Washington University and coordinated by the Defense Language and National Security Education Office (DLNSEO) will no longer be funded, ending a decade-long partnership.
The IAP newsletter described the overall grant program as having been “significantly cut” and said it was working with the services to identify an alternative set of options to keep critical regional training alive. That is the language of triage: the system is looking for workarounds after capacity has already been dismantled.
Sadly, the overall trend is not new. The Marine Corps has been slowly backing away from language, regional expertise, and culture (LREC) for years — shuttering its Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning in 2020 and reducing successor efforts to a minimal footprint inside the Brute Krulak Center at Marine Corps University before deactivating the Regional and Culture Studies Program in 2024.
Along the way, the Marines let formal cross-cultural competence expertise (including a dedicated professorship) wither. And the priorities behind recent cuts are explicit: the same IAP update notes fiscal year 2026 program funding will be reduced by at least $345,000 to support higher-priority initiatives, chiefly barracks modernization, with the blunt warning that “math, not emotions” will drive what can be supported.
This isn’t an argument against fixing barracks. It’s an argument about what happens when LREC becomes the bill payer for everything else.
I have seen the value of cultural competence both as an operator and as a scholar. As a Marine Corps intelligence and international affairs officer with multiple global deployments — and later as a graduate student in Taiwan — some of my most durable strategic lessons from deployments and graduate study were human ones: who really has influence in a partner ministry, which signals are meant for domestic audiences, when an “exercise” is political theater, and when a provocation is designed to be read as a warning. Those judgments rarely come from hard intelligence data alone.
We have learned this lesson before. After 9/11, the intelligence community was criticized for assuming technical collection could substitute for human understanding. The 9/11 Commission’s warning about a “failure of imagination” captured a broader problem: we undervalued the cultural and human foundations needed to interpret intent. For a time, the system absorbed the lesson. Then memory faded.
Great-power competition makes this drift more dangerous, not less. Consider a Taiwan Strait crisis. The United States may track every ship, missile battery, and cyber probe with exquisite precision — and still misread intent. A PLA exercise designed as calibrated political theater might be interpreted in Washington as preparations for an imminent invasion. Meanwhile, U.S. signals intended as deterrence can be read in Beijing through a different historical and cultural lens, producing the opposite of what was intended.
The Korean Peninsula carries similar risks. Analysts track North Korea’s missile launches and deployments with remarkable fidelity, yet still sometimes struggle to interpret why Pyongyang chooses a particular day, phrase, or ritual. Sometimes a test is designed to reinforce domestic legitimacy, commemorate a revolutionary holiday, or manage internal elite dynamics — not to signal immediate conflict.
Without cultural literacy, the United States and its allies may mistake ritual for escalation, or respond in ways that create the escalation they’d hoped to avoid.
Reversing this trend won’t be easy, but it is not complicated. Three steps would make a difference:
Treat cultural competence as a warfighting requirement again. Tie language, regional, and culture education to professional development and promotion — not as a token checkbox, but as a meaningful signal of what the institution values.
Stabilize the training pipeline. If DoD and the services believe regional expertise is critical, then DLI and sustainment programs cannot be treated as convenient bill payers whenever budgets tighten. Cutting sustainment is the policy equivalent of buying a fleet and refusing to fund maintenance.
Balance technology with human insight. AI and cyber tools have their place, but they must be paired with analysts and officers trained to ask why adversaries behave as they do. Data can track movement; culture helps interpret meaning. One without the other can be dangerous.
Sun Tzu’s advice remains unfashionably relevant: know your enemy and know yourself. That requires the hard, human work of cultural understanding — work that cannot be automated, surged at the last moment, or conjured after a crisis begins.
If we keep dismantling the institutions that teach us how to see the world through an adversary’s eyes, the surprise won’t be what our rivals can do. It will be what we failed to understand.
Owen West, the incoming head of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), previously advised Clearview AI, an invasive facial recognition technology company that has heavily involved itself in the Ukraine war to try to shed its pariah status in the commercial sector.
Created in 2015 to boost collaboration between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) was given more than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds to in 2025 to bring commercial technologies into the defense space through contract acquisition and award programs, public-private partnerships, and other opportunities.
Now at the helm of that organization, West is well-positioned to offer the company he advised a helping hand as well as boost the prospects for facial recognition and adjacent surveillance technology in the massive Pentagon budget. He has been the lead DOGE staffer at the Pentagon since last summer, and was more recently put in charge of its effort to acquire small drones for the military.
In September 2025, ICE awarded Clearview AI a $9.2 million contract for facial recognition investigations.
Founded in 2017 with funding from controversial venture capitalist and Pentagon contractor Peter Thiel, Clearview AI has over 60 billion images of faces in its database — scraped online, without consent — that it says can be used to identify almost anyone on earth. Barred from most U.S. private sector use in 2022 after the ACLU sued it for violating biometric privacy laws, the company has received hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for similar misconduct in Europe. It has dodged most of these fines.
Despite widespread condemnation of its facial recognition services as “dystopian,” some local and state law enforcement and ICE still use Clearview AI, as do the FBI, the Army, and Department of Justice.
Owen West joined Clearview AI’s Advisory Board in August 2021, as did other former government and law enforcement officials. (West served in the first Trump Administration as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations). According to archived versions of the company’s website, he served on the Clearview AI board until at least June 2024. The timing of his entrance into the second Trump administration roughly coincided with a leadership shakeup at Clearview AI, where its former CEO Hoan Ton-That was forced out in February 2025 amid financial struggles relating to the company’s reported difficulties in securing government contracts and funding.
Amid chronic bad press, Clearview AI has moved to showcase its usefulness in the Ukraine war. It offered its services to the Ukraine government, for free, at the beginning of the conflict to help its military identify Russian spies and soldiers — even dead Russian soldiers — and use the data it collected to help prosecute Russian war crimes.
As Clearview AI told TIME Magazine, since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian government had run facial recognition searches in its database more than 350,000 times in the first 20 months to identify more than 230,000 Russian soldiers, and also to locate 190 Ukrainian children it said had been abducted by Russia.
“The volume is insane,” Clearview AI’s then-CEO, Hoan Ton-That, told TIME. “Using facial recognition in war zones is something that's going to save lives.”
Supporting facial recognition technology, Owen West wrote back in 2022 that an online “Wall of Shame” publicizing “the names, pictures, locations and lifestyles of Putin's extended network,” could help hold Russians accountable for their role in the Ukraine war.
“To help loosen Putin's hold on Russia, combining crowdsourced photographs with facial recognition is a modern tactic too powerful to be ignored,” he wrote.
What West and Ton-That did not acknowledge is that these efforts, which they justify as wartime measures, risk further normalizing the surveillance of civilian populations, foreign, and domestic, writ-large.
Outside Clearview AI, West has ping-ponged between government and industry. Before his appointment in the first Trump administration, he served in the Iraq War as an officer in the Marine Corps and worked as a banker for Goldman Sachs.
West’s role at the DIU, which brings commercial technologies into the defense sector — while fostering a “dual-use” technology ecosystem that encourages the commercial sector to adopt weapons systems technologies in kind — could be a real boost to Clearview AI.
To this end, Clearview AI’s current CEO Hal Lambert, a prominent Trump fundraiser, has been positioning the company for “opportunities” sprouting from the current administration’s defense and border security priorities.
“We're talking to the [Pentagon], we're talking to Homeland Security…There are a number of different agencies we're in active dialogue with,” Lambert said early last year.
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