The Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program exemplifies the complexity of modern joint military production. When these weapons are used in contexts marked by serious breaches of international humanitarian law, as in Israel’s 2023–2025 military operation Swords of Iron in Gaza, questions arise about the accountability of the global supply chain that enables their use.
This report aims to bring clarity to the global production chain behind the F-35 aircraft, with a specific focus on the Israeli F-35I, and to assess the implications for compliance with international arms control frameworks.
This report seeks to highlight the urgent need for greater transparency and traceability in the transfer of advanced weapons components, thereby reinforcing national and international arms-control obligations with a focus on the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). It does so by scrutinizing the flow of conventional arms and technologies to states with troubling human-rights records through the F-35 program — one of the largest joint military production programs in history. Israel’s use of its fleet of F-35s — known as F-35I “Adirs” — in Operation Swords of Iron will serve as a case study.
A greater understanding of the F-35’s joint supply chain and, thereby, greater clarity on the transfer of F-35 components through the United States to Israel, can be achieved by analyzing F-35 contract data that is made available by the US Department of the Treasury.
US federal bodies are required to publish information on all contract, grant, loan, and other financial assistance awards valued at more than $25,000, including all prime contracts (or “prime awards”) and subcontracts (or “subawards”) associated with the F-35 program. Individual awards can be traced by their Procurement Instrument Identifier (PIID), a unique 13- to 17-digit alphanumeric identifier given to each prime award. This data is made available by the US government through several online portals, including USAspending.gov.
Lockheed Martin Corporation is the prime contractor for the F-35 program. Many manufacturers from participating states have been granted subawards to supply components for the aircraft. The subaward data available via the US Department of the Treasury includes, inter alia, the value of each subaward, the name of the manufacturer associated with the subaward, the manufacturer’s location, the date of the subaward, and a description of the subaward.
The F-35 program has reportedly involved approximately 1,650 individual manufacturers since its inception (Eastwood 2024). F-35s are produced in batches or “lots,” typically of hundreds of aircraft that are destined for a number of end-users. The US government does not list F-35 prime awards by lot numbers. However, in most cases, the lot numbers of each prime award can be determined by reviewing the description of the award or associated subawards.
By determining which lots produced aircraft for Israel and then determining which manufacturers from which countries won subawards for those lots, civil society can gain a clearer picture of the global supply chain involved in producing the Israeli F-35I.
Determining which prime awards were associated with each F-35 production lot was also achieved by analyzing Lockheed Martin documents on the F-35 subcontractor “Terms & Conditions” portal (LMC 2024b) and reviewing company promotional materials. This information was supplemented by information available in media and defence publications. Beginning with Lot 12, the F-35 has been manufactured under “block buys” (Insinna 2018), by which several lots are produced by Lockheed Martin under a single large award (Tirpak 2019).
To date, the bulk of the production on Israel’s current fleet of F-35Is can be tied to approximately six large contracts that contributed to the production on F-35s for a host of recipients. According to the data collected, more than 36,000 individual subawards from these contracts, valued at more than US$41.5 billion, were granted to 609 manufacturers from at least 14 countries. Of these, only a small subset of the production of each lot would be destined for Israel. For example, Lot 11 produced 141 aircraft for 11 end-users, with six aircraft going to Israel.
This report only analyzes subawards on the larger six prime awards identified and does not include information related to lower-tier awards. In other words, sub-subawards (granted by companies awarded subawards to other manufacturers further down the supply chain) are not captured in the dataset.
Figure 5 lists individual manufacturers tied to each production lot from which Israel procured the F-35. However, with the available information, it is not currently possible to determine the extent to which each manufacturer produced components destined for each F-35I. This is because, in some circumstances, it is possible that some components could have been provided by multiple manufacturers under a given lot, instead of being sole-sourced from one supplier.
The data compiled has been collected from open online sources. This data is exploratory, non-exhaustive, and open to further interpretation. Its purpose is to contribute to a greater understanding of global industrial contributions to the Israeli F-35I fleet and to promote compliance with national and international arms-control frameworks.
All data was downloaded in November 2024 and includes only the subawards that were available up to that date. Future updates are anticipated as additional information becomes available. For the full datasets, contact author Kelsey Gallagher.