Over two dozen US fleets said to fail to meet annual combat-readiness goals

A new federal watchdog report has flagged a troubling trend among US military aircraft: More than two dozen fleets haven't met their annual combat-readiness goals in at least a decade.

The Government Accountability Office studied 49 types of airframes across the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps for its November 10 report, Defense News reports.

Those platforms make up the bulk of American military airpower.

Service officials set yearly benchmarks for a metric called the “mission-capable rate,” or how often a type of aircraft can fly and perform at least one of its combat missions, like close air support or target tracking. Those targets can vary by airframe and by year.

GAO found that 26, or about half, of the aircraft studied never reached their annual readiness goal between fiscal 2011 and 2021, despite the Pentagon spending tens of billions of dollars on aircraft maintenance each year.

That includes all three Army and nine Marine Corps aircraft in the report, six of 22 Air Force platforms, and eight of 15 Navy airframes. They span 10 types of rotorcraft, eight kinds of fighter jets, three tanker aircraft, three cargo planes and two command-and-control platforms.

Just five airframes met their mission-capable goals in at least half of the years studied, and only one — the Air Force’s Vietnam War-era UH-1N Huey helicopter — hit the mark every year.

In 2021 alone, just two of the 49 fleets reached their goals. Seventeen fleets fell short by up to 10 percentage points, while 30 missed the mark by more than 10 points, GAO said.

“The average mission-capable rate for the selected aircraft has fallen for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, to varying degrees,” the watchdog said. “The average mission-capable rate for the selected Army aircraft has risen.”