We’re Bolting Dummy Weights Into Our Most Advanced Fighters

A maintenance crew at Hill Air Force Base in Utah has spent months prepping F-35A airframes for a radar that hasn’t arrived. The jets sit in their bays, flight-ready in every respect except the one that matters: they cannot find a target. In place of the APG-85 radar — the sensor suite that makes a fifth-generation fighter a fifth-generation fighter — each aircraft carries a ballast weight, a block of metal shaped to match the radar’s mass so the jet flies correctly. The crew can maintain everything on the aircraft except the thing that makes it a weapon.

Stealth Fighters With Dead Eyes

The APG-85 is the advanced electronically scanned array radar designed to replace the F-35’s original APG-81 sensor. Without it, an F-35 lacks the sensor capabilities the Block 4 upgrade was designed to deliver. Jets carrying the legacy radar can still fly missions but fall short of combat standard. Jets carrying ballast are reduced to training platforms.

As reported by The Aviationist, the Pentagon has begun accepting new Lot 17 F-35s without operational radars installed. If delays continue past 2027, over 100 jets could require costly retrofits before they can fly combat missions.

Rep. Rob Wittman, chairman of the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee, put the problem plainly: the interim period would leave the US military with “lots of aircraft out there, but not ones that are ready to go to the fight.” Wittman attributed the delays to lengthy certification timelines and a bulkhead redesign that made the new radar incompatible with current production airframes.

The F-35 problem would be troubling in isolation. It is not in isolation. The same defense industrial base that cannot deliver a radar on schedule is simultaneously failing to produce munitions at the rate the military consumes them. The pattern is not one program’s failure. It is a production culture that has lost the ability to deliver finished weapons.

A jet without eyes is a jet without a mission.

11,000 Rounds in 16 Days

In March 2026, US and Israeli forces expended over 11,000 munitions in 16 days of operations against Iran. The Royal United Services Institute documented the burn rate in its study “Command of the Reload,” concluding that the binding constraint on sustained military operations had shifted from battlefield tactics to industrial production capacity.

The Pentagon responded with a major surge in missile production, including an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract to Lockheed Martin to accelerate Precision Strike Missile production. But the surge strategy reveals its own constraint: tens of thousands of Mk 82-series bombs and JDAM guidance kits were purchased because more advanced long-range missiles could not be produced fast enough. The military was substituting cheaper, shorter-range munitions for the precision weapons it actually needed — a doctrinal compromise driven by the factory floor, not the battlefield.

President Trump claimed on Truth Social, 48 hours into the air war, that “we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons.” The claim contradicted years of Pentagon warnings about production capacity versus battlefield demand. Signals detach from reality at a cost, and the cost here is measured in interceptor stocks that take years to rebuild.

Depleted stockpiles don’t refill on a news cycle. They refill on a production cycle.

The Window That Closes by Opening

The conventional assumption is that visible American military weakness invites adversary action. But Beijing’s operational planning for a Taiwan scenario, as analyzed by Eric Rosenbach and Ethan Lee at Harvard’s Belfer Center, depends on a specific theory of victory: rapid US exhaustion of precision munitions in the opening days of a conflict, followed by a fait accompli before American production catches up.

If the United States enters such a conflict already depleted, the fait accompli theory may be complicated. Not because America is stronger, but because the exhaustion curve Beijing’s planners modeled could look different if drawdown has already occurred. There is no dramatic depletion to exploit because the depletion already happened. Simultaneously, allied nations are building autonomous capacity: South Korea expanding munitions exports, Japan increasing defense spending, Australia investing in guided weapons production.

The counterargument deserves honest weight. Pre-depletion could equally make US non-intervention more likely. But Beijing’s planning problem is not only whether America intervenes — it is whether America intervenes and runs out quickly. A pre-depleted America that intervenes with allied support and autonomous systems presents a longer, messier conflict than the one Chinese war planners may have optimized for.

Weakness that is legible changes the game differently than weakness that is hidden.

Convergence: The Constraint That Stacks

Nobody planned this outcome. The defense industrial base failed to deliver the APG-85 on schedule, leaving Lot 17 F-35s unable to perform their primary combat mission. Separately, the Iran conflict consumed over 11,000 munitions in 16 days, depleting stocks faster than any production surge could replenish. What neither failure solved was the thing connecting them: the Pentagon’s workaround for munitions depletion requires a functioning production base capable of surging output, but that same production base is the one failing to integrate a radar into the aircraft it designed around that radar.

If the radar integration delays and munitions production surge compete for overlapping certification bandwidth and defense-industrial management attention — a plausible but unconfirmed constraint — then the escape valve for one problem runs directly through the other’s chokepoint. This stacking effect is the critical question the Pentagon has not publicly addressed.

By accepting radar-less jets and substituting cheaper bombs for precision missiles, the Pentagon shunted pressure from a shared industrial constraint to a localized readiness cost borne by maintenance crews and combatant commanders who must plan around degraded capability. The cost of admitting that the defense industrial base cannot deliver at the quality and volume required would mean restructuring procurement relationships representing hundreds of billions in sunk political and financial capital. So the fiction holds.

The second-order effect is already visible. The US defense industrial base is failing to deliver radars and struggling with munitions surge capacity. South Korean defense exports rose sharply in 2025, and the trend is accelerating. The question is whether allied procurement officers are drawing the same conclusions about American reliability that the evidence suggests. South Korean defense exports rose sharply in 2025, and the trend is accelerating. Every allied dollar that flows to a Korean or European manufacturer is a dollar that no longer supports the US defense industrial base’s fixed costs — which makes the next American production surge harder. The loop feeds itself: US production failure drives allied diversification, which weakens US economies of scale, which deepens the next failure.

What to Watch

The APG-85 radar’s certification timeline is your first signal. If Lot 17 retrofits do not begin by mid-2027, the backlog of combat-incapable F-35s will exceed 100 airframes — a threshold where the Air Force and Marine Corps must formally revise force-structure plans. Watch for whether the Pentagon requests supplemental funding specifically for radar retrofits in the fiscal year 2027 budget submission. If it does not, the implication is that the military has quietly accepted a multi-year degradation of fifth-generation readiness. Treat the absence of that budget line as a louder signal than its presence.

On munitions, the PrSM surge contract’s delivery milestones will tell you whether “surge” means meaningful acceleration or bureaucratic relabeling. The first test is whether PrSM monthly production rates double by Q4 2026. Allied procurement decisions are your leading indicator of confidence: if Japan or Australia sign munitions co-production agreements with South Korean firms before the end of 2026, it signals that allied capitals have concluded the US production base cannot be relied upon for wartime replenishment.

I predict that at least two additional US allies will announce non-US munitions co-production agreements by December 2026. If this does not happen, it means allied governments still believe the American production surge is credible — or that political pressure from Washington is overriding procurement logic. The snap point arrives when the cost of maintaining the fiction of US production adequacy exceeds the political cost of publicly diversifying away from American suppliers. You will know the threshold has been crossed not from official statements but from contract announcements buried in defense ministry procurement bulletins.

If This Thesis Is Wrong

The strongest competing explanation: the F-35 radar delay is a normal development hiccup, not evidence of systemic industrial failure, and munitions stocks will be replenished within 18 months through the announced production surge. Under this theory, the Iran conflict was an anomalous demand spike, not a revelation of structural inadequacy. This explanation has history on its side. The US has drawn down and rebuilt stockpiles before.

The unresolved question is whether the defense industrial base’s failures are cyclical or structural. If PrSM production doubles on schedule and APG-85 retrofits begin by mid-2027, the cyclical explanation wins and this thesis was wrong.

The ballast block where the radar should be tells you everything about what American industry can deliver today.

Market Implication

If this thesis holds, the defense industrial constraint expresses itself across multiple instruments. The LMT/LIG.KS pair trade captures allied diversification away from US suppliers. A prediction market on allied co-production agreements by year-end 2026 directly tests whether procurement officers are drawing the same reliability conclusions the evidence suggests. Aluminum futures reflect raw material demand if retrofit and surge programs compete for industrial capacity. The thesis breaks if PrSM monthly production doubles by Q4 2026 AND APG-85 retrofits begin by mid-2027—watch the FY2027 budget for retrofit funding requests. The second-order play is Kratos: if manned platforms stay degraded, doctrine shifts toward autonomous systems.

Analytical implication, not financial advice.

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