Navy maintenance crews are stripping their own jets and submarines for spare parts

The U.S. Navy’s maintainers have had to strip submarines and fighter jets for spare parts to repair other planes and subs, a government watchdog found. In at least one case, mechanics repairing a Navy fighter jet could not repair a radio because the cables needed for the job were only available from the manufacturer.

“Only that vendor can make the part, and generally, repairs to that part are made on the OEM’s schedule,” the Government Accountability Office found in a report released late last month. “Officials considered reverse engineering the part or contracting to stock spare parts, but determined both options would be too costly. Maintainers, therefore, have resorted to cannibalizing grounded aircraft for the part.

The Government Accountability Office found that limited intellectual property and data rights, coupled with delays in the availability of parts, were forcing technicians to develop ad-hoc methods, including cannibalizing equipment to help keep certain vehicles mission-ready. 

The GAO found that the Department of Defense did not fully review the data rights it has to certain intellectual property, leading to issues in maintaining weapons systems. Business Insider first reported on the GAO’s findings. The watchdog examined five Navy contracts — the F/A-18 and F-35 fighter jets, littoral combat ships, the Stryker Combat Vehicle, and Virginia-class attack submarines — to see how they were handling maintenance for the systems. The watchdog found that Navy mechanics and crews faced ongoing delays, mainly stemming from a lack of spare parts due to limited sourcing options.

“Cannibalization has several adverse impacts, including increasing maintenance costs and workload, and when overused, long-term adverse effects on aircraft availability,” the report found.

Navy maintainers were also cannibalizing parts from other submarines to fix Virginia-class submarines, to avoid delaying repairs while waiting for spares to be sent by manufacturers. 

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Other problems include a lack of technical data available, such as with the F-35, preventing on-site Navy maintainers from making repairs. In some cases, the GAO found, “depot-level maintainers may not have data rights that allow government personnel to make repairs without support from, or contracting with,” manufacturers. 

In these cases, repairs rely on bringing in those outside contractors to handle matters, either at port or flying them in while at sea. As the GAO found, the Navy has developed several ad-hoc workarounds to deal with the lack of materiel and intellectual property rights. That ranged from stocking up on long-lead materials to prevent shortages on site to requesting certain data rights in follow-up contracts with suppliers. 

The findings come as the Navy, along with other parts of the military, pushes for the “right to repair.” Currently, service members have to contend with warranties or other intellectual property matters, preventing them from being able to make repairs on parts, including in the field, even when they otherwise could be able to do so. 

The report echoes another GAO study released in September, which found that the Army and Marine Corps’ ground vehicles were facing similar parts shortages, with troops taking parts from other pieces to repair them. That decline both in available parts and in up-to-date technical manuals meant that there was a steady decline in the number of major repairs and overhauls in recent years and fewer vehicles were deemed mission-ready.