Senior Air Force officers used a major defense conference to defend the F-35 Lightning II's combat record during two recent Middle East operations, just months after a government watchdog found only one in four jets across the fleet was fully mission-capable.
Maj. Gen. Brian Laidlaw and Col. Charles A. Fallon told attendees at the Air & Space Forces Association's 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Monday that the fifth-generation fighter delivered high mission-capable rates, fast turnaround times, and rapid weapons certification during Operation Epic Fury and Operation Midnight Hammer. Their remarks amounted to a direct rebuttal of a June 2026 Government Accountability Office report that pegged the full F-35 fleet's readiness rate at just 25 percent.
The gap between those two numbers, a quarter of the fleet ready on paper, but strong performance in theater, frames a debate that matters to every taxpayer funding the most expensive weapons program in American history. Air Force leaders say the jet performs when it counts. The GAO's data says the broader fleet is struggling with software delays, parts shortages, and corrosion.
Laidlaw calls combat results proof the jet works "when properly resourced"
Laidlaw pointed to the F-35's performance during both operations as evidence that the aircraft can deliver when given the support it needs. Military Times reported his central claim plainly:
"When properly resourced, we showed without a doubt how well this airplane can perform in combat."
That qualifier, "when properly resourced", does real work. It concedes that the readiness problems the GAO flagged are not imaginary. It also shifts the blame away from the airframe itself and toward the supply chain, maintenance infrastructure, and funding pipeline behind it. Whether Congress and the Pentagon have delivered those resources consistently is a separate question the general did not address at the conference.
Laidlaw also highlighted the jet's versatility. During combat operations, the F-35 took on mission types that demanded new weapons. A certification process that would normally stretch across months or years in peacetime was compressed dramatically during the deployments. Laidlaw credited allies and industry partners for helping accelerate the timeline, though he did not name specific weapons or partners.
He expressed hope that the accelerated wartime certification model could serve as a template for future operations, a reasonable goal, given that the Air Force's fighter fleet already falls short of Congress's 1,145-aircraft minimum and cannot afford long bureaucratic timelines for equipping the planes it does have.
Fallon: maintenance crews had time to smoke between sorties
Col. Fallon offered the most vivid description of the F-35's operational tempo. He told the conference audience that turnaround times between sorties, the window for refueling and rearming, ran roughly 45 minutes. That left ground crews with little to do between cycles, a sharp contrast to the maintenance headaches that have dogged the jet's reputation stateside.
"You go out there on an F-35 flight line in between goes, people are smoking a Lucky. There's nothing going on."
The image is striking precisely because the F-35's maintenance profile has been one of its biggest political liabilities for years. Critics have pointed to depot backlogs, software glitches, and parts shortages as evidence the jet is too complex to sustain at scale. Fallon's account suggests the deployed units, at least, ran smoothly enough that crews had downtime.
Fallon also stressed that faster turnaround times carry life-or-death stakes. Cutting rearming windows from hours to minutes means pilots can get back in the fight sooner, and that ground forces waiting on air support do not wait as long.
"When we can start cutting down from hours to minutes, that really matters and that equals people's lives."
The colonel made clear the operational pace is not slowing down. He said more than half the wing has been deployed at any given time over the past two and a half years, and he does not expect that to change soon. That sustained deployment rate underscores how heavily the Air Force leans on the F-35 in active operations, even as the broader fleet wrestles with readiness shortfalls.
Operation Epic Fury put the F-35 in a shooting war, and it delivered a historic first
The operations Laidlaw and Fallon referenced were not small-scale engagements. Operation Epic Fury involved a major U.S. military campaign against Iran that destroyed the country's navy, air force, and air defenses. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed during the operation that Iranian missile volume dropped 90 percent and drone attacks fell 95 percent as U.S. forces dismantled the regime's military infrastructure. The campaign also carried real costs: all six crew members aboard a U.S. Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker that crashed in Iraq during the operation were killed.
The F-35 platform proved itself in air-to-air combat during that same campaign. An Israeli F-35I "Adir", the Israeli variant of the jet, shot down an Iranian Yak-130 in a dogfight over Tehran during Operation Roaring Lion, Israel's component of the broader Operation Epic Fury. The Washington Examiner reported the engagement marked the first-ever air-to-air kill by an F-35 since the aircraft entered service over a decade ago.
That milestone matters. For years, skeptics questioned whether the F-35, designed primarily as a multi-role strike fighter with stealth capabilities, could hold its own in a traditional dogfight. The Israeli shootdown answered that question in the most direct way possible.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon's own handling of the operation's legacy has raised eyebrows. The Defense Department told the military to stop using the "Operation Epic Fury" name months after it said the operation had ended, an odd bureaucratic footnote to a campaign that Air Force leaders are now citing as proof of their most expensive fighter's combat effectiveness.
GAO's 25 percent readiness figure looms over the praise
The conference remarks did not happen in a vacuum. The GAO's June 2026 report found that the full fleet of F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters posted a readiness rate of just 25 percent. The Air Force itself acknowledged within that report that the decline stemmed in part from software delays, parts availability problems, and corrosion issues.
A 25 percent readiness rate means three out of every four jets in the fleet were not fully mission-capable at the time of the assessment. That is a sobering number for a program that has consumed hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars over its lifetime. And it raises a fair question: if the F-35 performs well in combat "when properly resourced," as Laidlaw said, why is the military failing to properly resource three-quarters of the fleet?
The Air Force's answer, software, parts, corrosion, points to systemic supply chain and industrial base problems, not design flaws in the jet itself. That distinction matters, but it does not let anyone off the hook. Taxpayers fund the supply chain too. If the logistics tail cannot keep pace with the airframe, the program has a readiness problem regardless of how well individual jets perform in theater.
The service is also investing in next-generation platforms alongside the F-35. Both the B-21 Raider bomber and the F-47 fighter are running ahead of schedule, and the Air Force has explored launching drone swarms from cargo planes to defend overseas bases. Those programs will eventually share maintenance infrastructure and budget dollars with the F-35, making the existing fleet's readiness problems even harder to ignore.
Combat performance versus fleet health is the real fight
Laidlaw and Fallon made a credible case that the F-35 does what it was built to do when it gets to the fight. The turnaround times, the mission-capable rates in theater, the accelerated weapons certification, and the Israeli air-to-air kill all point to a capable warfighting platform. No one at the conference disputed that.
But "getting to the fight" is the problem. A fleet where 75 percent of the jets are not fully ready cannot sustain the kind of high-tempo deployments Fallon described, not indefinitely. More than half the wing deployed at any given time for two and a half years is a punishing pace. If the supply chain, the software updates, and the corrosion fixes do not catch up, the Air Force will keep asking a shrinking pool of mission-capable jets to carry an outsized load.
The officials' praise was earned in combat. The GAO's concerns were earned in data. Both can be true at the same time. The question is whether the Pentagon and Congress will treat the readiness gap as the urgent industrial problem it is, or whether conference speeches about combat success will serve as cover for a fleet that still cannot get three-quarters of its jets off the ground.
A weapon that works brilliantly in the fight but cannot get to the fight is not a ready force. It is a warning.
