You know what it’s like when you can’t upgrade to the latest operating system. Most of your apps work, but you face frustrating compatibility issues, and then over time your gadget becomes glitchy and unusable. It’s annoying enough when this happens to your $1,100 phone, but it’s even more disturbing when that gadget is an $80 million fighter jet and you’re right in the middle of trying to use it to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The quest for fully updated software for F-35 fighters has slowed, according to a yet-unpublished Pentagon report reviewed by Bloomberg.
As Defense One’s 2023 report makes clear, related issues have been troubling the Pentagon and F-35 maker Lockheed Martin for some time. F-35s with Technology Refresh 2 (TR-2) hardware and software systems were theoretically required to update to the new Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) system. Which would have provided “20 to 25 times more computing power, more memory and a new panoramic cockpit display.”
But actually installing TR-3 on jets at the time reportedly made them unreliable, and the Pentagon stopped taking deliveries of F-35s until they came up with working software. “Although we cannot provide the metrics involved due to security concerns, at a minimum the TR-3 must meet TR-2 equivalency before it can be accepted for operational use,” Russ Goemere, a Pentagon F-35 program spokesman, said at the time.
According to a statement from Lockheed in 2024, Lockheed Martin began deliveries of the TR-3 capable F-35 in July of that year. According to the official F-35 website, that statement touted compatibility with the Block 4 system, which includes “increased missile-carrying capability, advanced non-kinetic electronic warfare capabilities, and improved target identification”.
But according to a new Pentagon document recently reviewed by Bloomberg, the F-35 was not provided with any additional combat capabilities in 2025. The new report said the TR-3 was “largely unusable” for most of 2025 because of “stability problems, reduced capability, and continued discovery of deficiencies.”
It should be noted that the report, in Bloomberg’s phrase, “refers to a software version that was not fully tested.”
The F-35’s cost overruns are notorious. In 2016, when Donald Trump was president-elect, he wrote that spending was “out of control” and that he was considering cutting spending on the program after his inauguration. They actually reduced the cost of an individual F-35 by 25% in 2018, although overall spending on the program remained at superhuman levels. But then he requested fewer F-35s in last year’s Pentagon spending package than before.
But the F-35 appears to be seeing combat potential with or without the recent software upgrades. The US moved F-35s to positions near Iran before the fighting began, and the Jerusalem Post claimed US forces used at least one to shoot down a drone in the past week. Israel, for its part, says it is waging air-to-air combat on Iran using its own F-35s.
Lockheed Martin did not respond to a request for comment.
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