You know how it goes when you can’t upgrade to the latest operating system. Most of your apps work, but you start running into frustrating compatibility issues, and then over time your gadget becomes glitchy and borderline unusable. It’s annoying enough when this happens to your $1,100 phone, but it must be downright irksome when the gadget in question is an $80 million fighter jet and you’re right in the middle of trying to use it to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The pursuit of fully updated software for F-35 fighter jets has petered out, according to an as-yet unpublished report from the Pentagon reviewed by Bloomberg.
As a 2023 report from Defense One makes clear, related issues have been plaguing the Pentagon and F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin for some time. F-35s with the Technology Refresh 2 (TR-2) hardware and software system were theoretically in need of an update to the new Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) system which would have provided “20 to 25 times more computing power, plus more memory and a new panoramic cockpit display.”
But actually installing TR-3 on the jets at the time reportedly made them unreliable, and the Pentagon stopped taking delivery of F-35s unless they arrived with functioning software. “Although we cannot provide the metrics involved due to security concerns, at a minimum TR-3 must meet TR-2 equivalency before it can be accepted for operational use,” Russ Goemaere, the Pentagon’s F-35 program spokesman said at the time.
According to a 2024 statement from Lockheed, Lockheed Martin started delivering TR-3 enabled F-35s in July of that year. That statement touted compatibility with the Block 4 system, which adds “increased missile-carriage capacity, added advanced non-kinetic electronic warfare capabilities and improved target recognition,“ according to the official F-35 website.
But according to the new Pentagon document Bloomberg just reviewed, the F-35 no additional combat capabilities were delivered in 2025. The new report says TR-3 “was predominately unusable” for most of 2025, because of “stability problems, shortfalls in capability and ongoing discovery of deficiencies.”
It should be noted that the report, in Bloomberg’s phrasing, refers to a “software version that hadn’t fully been tested.”
The F-35’s cost overruns are notorious. In 2016, when Donald Trump was president-elect, he wrote that expenses were “out of control” and that he was considering cutting spending to the program after his inauguration. He actually did eventually bring down the cost of an individual F-35 by 25% in 2018, although total spending on the program remained at otherworldly levels. But then he requested fewer F-35s than before in last year’s Pentagon spending package.
But it seems F-35s have been seeing combat lately, with or without software upgrades. The U.S. moved F-35s into position near Iran before fighting began, and the Jerusalem Post has claimed that U.S. forces have at least used one to shoot down a drone in the past week. Israel for its part says it’s been engaging in air-to-air battles over Iran using its own F-35s.
Lockheed Martin did not return a request for comment.
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