At first glance, the Government Accountability Office’s September 2025 report on the F-35 looks technical, dry, and niche—albeit important—an audit of whether contractors delivered engines and airframes on time and on budget, adhered to best practices, and managed production bottlenecks.

Look closer, and a more consequential story comes into view. The report points past corporate missteps to deeper structural weaknesses in America’s defense-industrial ecosystem and the urgent investments needed to repair it. Even in an age rushing toward AI-enabled autonomy, the F-35’s stealth and sensor fusion still supply vital advantages in an increasingly volatile strategic environment.

So the headline is not that the F-35 is late and expensive. It’s that decades of industrial hollowing-out made that outcome predictable. When you allow critical capacity to atrophy, a shock like COVID-19 doesn’t just slow a program; it can stall whole production lines.

The temptation is to pin this on Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney—and both have remedial work to do. But fixating on the primes misses the larger point: firms are behaving rationally inside an irrational system. We should not be surprised when companies embedded in a brittle, under-resourced industrial base struggle to deliver on complex, low-volume, high-precision programs.

The GAO’s findings are not aberrations; they are symptoms of a long policy arc that prized “efficiency” over resilience. We eliminated “redundant” production, ignored supply-chain fragility, and allowed both specialized manufacturing and skilled labor pipelines to wither. The United States once fielded the world’s envy—an “arsenal of democracy.” Today’s contractors inherited an industrial base leached by well-intentioned but misguided reforms. Post-Cold War “acquisition reform” elevated short-term cost savings over industrial capacity, competition over strategic redundancy, and private efficiency over public resilience. We built a system where contractors operate on thin margins across bespoke production runs—and then feign surprise when ambitious timelines slip and budgets swell.

The conceptual failure is treating defense manufacturing as just another market rather than critical national infrastructure. We have not cultivated a healthy “industrial commons”—the ecosystem of tiered suppliers, secure supply chains, vocational training, research institutions, and production capabilities that enable integration and surge capacity. That commons does not materialize on its own. It demands deliberate, patient public investment and coherent policy architecture.

Unsurprisingly, the GAO’s critique reflects this deeper deficit. Integrating advanced systems across a fragile ecosystem compounds risk; a missing tier-three supplier or an overstretched workforce can ripple across the entire program.

Fixing this requires more than triage on the F-35 line—though that matters, too. What’s needed is an ambitious rebuilding of America’s defense industrial base, one that is economically smart and democratically accountable. Both the Biden and Trump administrations wrestled with acquisition and workforce reform; Trump’s executive order on modernizing defense acquisitions and spurring innovation in the industrial base, for instance, seemed to disappear into the bureaucratic ether.

Where to begin?

Fund research facilities, workforce pipelines, and strategic manufacturing capabilities that create the conditions for sustained success. This is the mundane infrastructure—labs, test ranges, apprenticeship programs—that underwrites on-time delivery later.

Target capital and technical assistance toward small and mid-sized manufacturers. The current overreliance on a handful of mega-contractors reflects a failure to maintain the supplier networks that provide resilience, cost discipline, and innovation. Smart public investment can re-seed these networks and spread high-quality manufacturing jobs across the country—addressing the report’s core finding that many delays trace back to supply-chain fragility and systemic production pressures.

Quarterly earnings cycles are a poor fit for decade-long system development. New financing mechanisms—blended public-private funds, milestone-based patient capital, or long-horizon procurement commitments—can better align private incentives with public timelines.

Treat defense manufacturing as part of a broader industrial strategy. The capabilities that build advanced aircraft can also produce commercial jets, renewable-energy systems, and next-generation transportation. Multi-market demand drives scale, lowers unit costs, and keeps critical skills sharp.

None of this absolves the primes of responsibility. But focusing solely on contractor performance obscures how we have organized national priorities. Demanding 21st-century agility from 20th-century infrastructure while clinging to 19th-century market assumptions is a recipe for failure.

With the F-35—arguably America’s most important aerial asset—the stakes are obvious. Its strategic value has been demonstrated from NATO’s eastern flank to the Indo-Pacific. Leaving its production hostage to brittle supply chains and exhausted workforces is not merely inefficient; it edges toward national-security malpractice.

A resilient defense industrial base requires active government stewardship—sustained investments that create, maintain, and modernize capacity. The GAO’s broader lesson isn’t just about late subassemblies or parts shortages; it’s about the need for a systemic commitment to industrial renewal. Treat manufacturing capability as public infrastructure; treat workforce development as a social investment; treat technological sovereignty as a democratic imperative. That is how you build the industrial commons our security actually requires.