Air Combat Command’s director of operations stood up at the Air, Space and Cyber conference this week and said the F-35 “absolutely proved itself” in combat over Iran.

He is right. He also attached a condition to the sentence that is doing an enormous amount of work.

When properly resourced. The F-35’s problem has never been what it can do on a good day. It has been how many of them are having a good day at any given moment — and on that, the most recent Government Accountability Office figure is that barely one in four F-35As is fully mission capable.

The Surge Was Real. That Is Not the Argument.

Nobody serious disputes that F-35 availability improved during Epic Fury. Wartime does that. Parts get prioritised, cannibalisation rules relax, contractor field teams appear, and maintenance crews work hours nobody would accept in peacetime.

The campaign was also genuinely enormous. Around 500 combat aircraft flying roughly 250 sorties a day for 38 days is the largest air campaign in a generation, and 10,000 sorties is not a number you produce with a hangar full of unavailable jets.

So the demonstration stands. What it demonstrates is narrower than the headline suggests: that the F-35 performs when the supply chain behind it is fully fed. That was never really in doubt.

Why One in Four Is the Number That Matters

Fully mission capable means the aircraft can perform every mission it is assigned, not merely get airborne. It is a demanding standard and a deliberately uncomfortable one, which is why the GAO uses it.

A fleet at roughly 25 per cent fully mission capable is not a fleet you can surge indefinitely. And the trend is the wrong way: fully mission capable has fallen from 38.1 per cent in 2021 to 24.6 per cent in 2025, while the overall mission-capable rate slid from 66.8 to 44.1 per cent. You can surge it for 38 days by drawing down stocks, deferring maintenance and moving parts from aircraft that will not fly. The bill arrives afterwards, and it arrives as a deeper readiness trough than you started with.

This is the third time this year the F-35 sustainment picture has come up. In August the programme’s projected cost rose again, and the GAO’s readiness findings have been consistent for longer than that. Epic Fury does not overturn those findings. It sits alongside them. The programme office has been blunter than the podium: with more than 1,300 aircraft operational and a support system designed for 700 to 800, the fleet has simply outgrown its own logistics. The answer on the table is the Global Support Solution Reset, roughly $13.7 billion through 2031 aimed at spares, depot capacity and maintenance planning.

What Would Actually Settle It

The honest test is not what the fleet did in March. It is what the fleet looks like in March next year.

If mission-capable rates a year after the campaign are higher than they were before it, then something structural improved and Lockheed’s argument about spare-parts throughput is vindicated. If they are lower — the normal post-surge pattern — then Epic Fury was a demonstration of what money and urgency can buy temporarily, which is a different and much less reassuring claim.

Laidlaw’s sentence contains its own test. Properly resourced, it works. The question the Air Force has never answered is whether it intends to properly resource it when nobody is shooting.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine, AFA Air, Space & Cyber conference reporting, 14–15 September 2026; Defense News; US Government Accountability Office.