This article is part of our President’s FY2024 Budget Request Coverage. Visit our Rolling Analysis Page for more.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter tops the Pentagon charts for aircraft programs under “Major Investments in the FY2024 Budget.”

The official, Pentagon produced, chart clocks in at $13.6 billion of a total investment in major aircraft programs. That’s out of $26.5 billion spread across eight aircraft programs in all the military services. So, half of the budget is devoted to the F-35.

Our perusal of the budget charts currently available shows a total of $13.7 billion for the various iterations of the F-35. We scoured the budget tables for Procurement, Advance Procurement, Research & Development, and modifications to existing F-35s. Our goal is one chart to show all the money devoted to the F-35 in the FY24 budget request.

Admittedly, this doesn’t include Military Construction programs for things like F-35 hangars. Those details are harder to winkle out, but we’re already perplexed by MILCON projects like the ineptly named “F-35A Child Development Center” at RAF Lakenheath in England. That clocks in at $24 million. But, before we add that to what’s in the budget for the F-35, we need to do some due diligence. While ChatGPT AI is out there, we’re pretty certain that the F-35s are not able to procreate. There are no F-35 CHILDREN who will be going to the development center. Presumably it is for the children of people associated with the F-35 wing at RAF Lakenheath. But it’s harder to discern if those would be the only military dependents who would use that center. If not, it would be unfair to chalk up all those costs against the F-35 program. So, there’s more research needed than we can complete today.

With that caveat, behold the unclassified details of how much of the Pentagon budget is devoted to the F-35.