The Pentagon’s F-35 Office Has No Idea What an F-35 Looks Like

You might think that, given the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office’s singular responsibility of ensuring the U.S. military’s F-35 fleet is ready to fight tonight, the service members working for that office would be intimately familiar with at least a handful of the passing details of the aircraft, no matter how far from an engineering bay their job may take them. Sadly, that is not the case.

On Veterans Day, the F-35 JPO posted a seemingly-innocuous (and since-deleted) image of an F-35 to X, formerly known as Twitter, in a tribute to the service and sacrifice of American veterans – except that the aircraft featured does not look like an F-35.

Here’s the JPO image in a screenshot for posterity:

And here is a photo of an Air Force F-35 from the Wisconsin Air National Guard’s 115th Fighter Wing published by the U.S. military in 2023:

We have many questions. Mainly: Where did those twin engines on the JPO image come from? The F-35 uses a single Pratt & Whitney F135 turbofan engine (in two different variants, depending on the aircraft), whereas the fighter in the JPO tweet appears to resemble the twin-enginer Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) J-35 fighter jet more than anything else.

Unfortunately, this sort of public affairs flub happens all too often. For July 4th last year, the U.S. Pacific Fleet's official account tweeted a photo that appeared to show the silhouettes of a Russian Kashin-class destroyer and five Sukhoi-27s fighter jets against the backdrop of an American flag with the command’s Independence Day message. Back in 2021, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service used a photo composite showing an American flag alongside a Russian Kirov-class battlecruiser to wish the U.S. Navy a happy birthday, the very same mistake Republican Rep. Brian Mast also made back in 2019.

Still, this is quite embarrassing – especially on Veterans Day. But between missed readiness goals and rising costs, it makes sense that the F-35 JPO has other stuff to focus on other than accurately representing its primary aircraft on social media.

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