YUMA, Arizona—Marine Corps F-35 jets enjoyed some of their highest-ever readiness rates during a five-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific—largely because amphibious warship Boxer had enough spare parts and manpower to maintain 10 of the jets but only carried six for most of the deployment.
Officials decided not to bring all 10 of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 225’s F-35Bs aboard the Boxer, a choice that reflected the needs of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the limited space in the three ships of the amphibious ready group. Instead, the squadron sent four of them ahead to Iwakuni, Japan, for the bulk of the deployment—a first for F-35s deploying with a MEU.
While VMFA-225 retained operational control of the quartet of jets, their maintenance was handled by the base, home to two F-35 squadrons of its own. That left squadron maintainers on the Boxer with just six jets—and enough spare parts for 10, said Lt. Col. Benjamin Schmidt, VMFA-225’s commanding officer.
“Our deployed readiness was higher than it’s been on the MEU for F-35 for quite some time, because the Boxer’s [Afloat Spares Packages] was built to have 10 jets, but we only had six for most of the deployment, so we had more parts available than if we would were to have all 10 jets,” Schmidt told Defense One. “I had excess parts and I had excess manpower.”
The F-35 program has long struggled with shortages of spare parts, which have hampered fleet-wide readiness.
But readiness rates are better for deployed jets since they take higher priority for parts, and the ship is loaded with Afloat Spares Packages, or ASP, that support operations on a ship, so the squadron doesn’t have to wait for a part to be delivered, like they would if they were back home at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma.
It also helps to have maintainers available around the clock, as happens on shipboard deployments. In their labor-intensive fight against corrosion, Schmidt said, maintainers must pull panels from the jet, use a wire brush and abrasives to remove the corrosion, and then reapply the jet’s low-observable coating.
“We were able to combat corrosion because I had 24-hour maintenance. We are on the ship. They don’t have to go home. They live on the ship,” Schmidt said. Jobs that might have taken more than a month ashore were getting done in a week, he said.
And when the squadron returned to Yuma at the end of November, Schmidt said the jets were in pristine condition, compliant with the corrosion maintenance requirements.
But before the F-35 squadron made it to the Pacific, the squadron dealt with a number of unexpected changes to the deployment. The MEU was originally supposed to deploy in October 2023, but ship maintenance and a months-long grounding of the V-22 Osprey fleet delayed the deployment. Just 10 days after Boxer left in April, the rudder broke, forcing the ship back to San Diego. It took about two and a half months to fix, in part due to a lack of capacity at West Coast shipyards. Ongoing problems with amphib availability has had widespread effects on Marine Corps’ operations and training, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.
Boxer finally left San Diego in July, and met up with the other two ships in the amphibious ready group: the transport dock ship Somerset (LPD-25), which left in January, and the dock landing ship Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), which left with Boxer in April but kept going after Boxer had to turn back.
Those ships covered some of the MEU’s planned exercises in the Pacific while Boxer was getting repaired, Schmidt said, but it wasn’t a full force. The four-jet detachment, which started heading for Iwakuni in March, stayed in Japan since officials didn’t know how long the rudder repair would take, he said.
Despite the rocky start, Schmidt said the deployment helped hone and expand F-35 operations in the Pacific. The stealth jet will be “center stage” to Marine aviation operations in the Pacific, he said, as the service shifts from the F/A-18 Super Hornet to a fleet of all F-35s.
The service is buying both the F-35B, which can take off from a short runway and land vertically, and the F-35C, which was built for Navy carrier operations. The Bravo, the Marine’s primary version of the fifth-generation jet, can land on a 500-foot strip—opening up the number of available operating bases across the Pacific. But landing is just one piece of the puzzle. Several logistics hurdles remain to be worked out before the Marines can actually operate F-35Bs on austere bases.
With no organic logistics support on these bases, the service needs to figure out how the jets will load up on gas and weapons when they land, Schmidt said.
“There’s some other non-taking off-and-landing stuff you gotta consider as well, which you can argue with the shorter deployment, we didn’t really get a chance to test that,” he said.
Schmidt said the deployment proved that Iwakuni is a viable base for F-35s attached to a MEU, but that was already an established F-35 base, and there’s more work to be done to find other viable bases to move jets forward.
“How do we move the entire squadron off the ship to places in the first island chain? How do you get that logistics support?” Schmidt said. “If I’m maintaining a base or maintaining a hub or a spoke somewhere other than Iwakuni, now I’ve got to have support coming to me. So how do we work through that?”
The VMFA-225 commander said the deployment was an overall success, citing the Iwakuni detachment and the squadron’s flexibility in the face of changes.
The unexpected circumstances didn’t damage troops’ morale either; Schmidt and other Marines chose to extend their service to complete the deployment.
“They wanted to extend, so seeing the Marines come together to do this thing was just inspiring for me as a commander, and just knowing this was not your vanilla MEU. It had its challenges, but I think we still completed the mission,” he said.
After the interview, Schmidt handed off command of VMFA-225 to Lt. Col. James Braudt. Schmidt now works with Marine Aircraft Group 13 in Yuma.
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