U.S. Marine Corps accepts six F-35Bs without radars as part of accelerated Block 4 production plan

The U.S. military has accepted at least six F-35B aircraft for the Marine Corps without radars installed. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Masiello, head of the F-35 Joint Program Office, confirmed the deliveries during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this week.

He attributed the acceptances to a lack of available AN/APG-85 radars. The first production lot of the AN/APG-85 is scheduled for delivery in 2028, with initial units not expected before April of that year. The radar forms a core element of the Block 4 modernization program.

Official budget documents list its unit cost at nearly $9 million. The hardware required to mount the AN/APG-85 is not compatible with the current AN/APG-81 radar installed on F-35A, B, and C variants. Senator Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and retired naval aviator, raised the issue while questioning readiness statistics.

“So, the GAO FMC rate is, they said, 25 percent. Your office claims it’s 56 percent. We’ll go with your number, 50 percent,” Kelly said. “So, half of the airplanes are not fully mission capable, and I think it’s the Marine Corps that has been accepting airplanes with no radar in it.

Masiello replied: “We have accepted six aircraft for the Marine Corps that do not have a radar installed. ” He later added that he would not count the aircraft as fully mission capable. Kelly responded that he could not imagine a scenario in which an F-35 without a radar would qualify as fully mission capable.

A Government Accountability Office report released two weeks earlier stated that the average F-35 full-mission-capable rate across all variants fell from 38 percent in fiscal year 2020 to 25 percent in fiscal year 2025. The F-35 Joint Program Office has not disputed the GAO figures but has disagreed with the methodology used to calculate them.