The US military-industrial complex, as a "behemoth" hidden behind the US system, has always had a strong influence on US politics. But even so, in the US political arena, which is famous for its hype, there are still some congressmen who try to find something "neither big nor too small" in the military-industrial complex to provide opportunities for their own political path. And these days, the Pentagon has been poked out with a set of "weird" data.
The cause of the incident was actually last weekend, when Matt Gates, a member of the US House of Representatives, broke the news on social media, saying that the US Air Force Secretary personally admitted that less than one-third of the F-35 fighters in active service in the US Air Force are combat-capable. Then criticize the Pentagon, arguing that those defense contractors are cheating American taxpayers out of their money.
Immediately, the news was widely disseminated, considering that in the past ten years, the Pentagon has exposed a series of scandals, what 90,000 US dollars of goats, thousands of dollars of coffee cups, hot water kettles, the American people on the Internet is "a little bit of fire". Even Musk came out to ridicule the U.S. Air Force, and one-third of the fighters met the standards.
Frankly speaking, freezing three feet is not a day's cold, and the US Air Force has come to this point, and everyone on the Internet ridicules it, and the reason for itself is indeed very big. The reputation of the F-35 is indeed not good, and there have been frequent accidents in the past two years. even exposed some hidden dangers that have been hidden for many years, such as the most classic, which is the F-35 exposed in 2021 with problems in structural design and 857 technical defects. This one really "exploded". Even to the point where Belgium refused to accept the F-35A.
I see that during this time, there are also many articles on the domestic Internet about this matter. There are quite a few people who even predict the combat effectiveness of the US Air Force, believing that the combat effectiveness of the US military on paper has also been greatly reduced. To put it bluntly, although a lot of things have been exposed about the US military F-35 in recent years, the truth behind the data that "only 30% can be used" may not be the same as everyone thinks.
Let's first talk about how the data "three percent can be used" came from. In the Americans, it's called MCR, and we call it "Mission Execution Rate". This numerical calculation is not the impression that the number of aircraft can be used to subtract the total number of aircraft. Rather, it is calculated based on the number of replaceable parts in the hands of the support level at the grassroots level. In this regard, China and the United States are similar. In addition, if there is a problem with the aircraft, it is impossible to repair it at the grassroots support level, and what can be done is to replace the parts, and then send the replaced parts to a higher level of support for maintenance, and even return to the factory in serious cases.
For example, if we have 24 aircraft in a grassroots unit, the MCR value that can affect the "mission execution rate" is the value that can be replaced by parts in the hands of the grassroots support level. When there is a problem with the parts of 3 aircraft, but you only have 2 parts in your hand, the MCR value is only about 60%.
There is a research article in China that has calculated this value change, probably the more accessories in the hands of the front-line maintenance level, the higher your MCR value. The reduction in MCR values due to aircraft fault replacement is very small. But when the number of accessories in hand changed from 3 to 2, the value dropped directly to 59.11%. Of course, it is also necessary to admit that it is not that the more accessories in the hands of the grassroots security level, the better, because these accessories are not used, firstly, there will be loss when they are left dry, and secondly, the pressure on the financial situation is also real. Therefore, it is very important to ensure a "degree" while ensuring MCR.
Now, back to the question of the US Air Force. The core of the problem of "three percent can be used" is actually the lack of logistics support and the insufficient supply capacity of spare parts after the outbreak of deindustrialization and financial problems in the United States, rather than simply saying that the aircraft cannot perform its mission. You can say that the US military's air force logistics support is fragile, and there may be a risk of accidents after a few battles, but you can't directly judge that it will have no combat effectiveness. This one is different. It is even said that the Pentagon deliberately released these data, so that the outside world has been hyping up the concept of "F-35 is more or less unusable" in the past two years, which is more like a war and a sudden situation.