A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has found that the U.S. Defense Department is failing to share operational lessoned learned by operators of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter among the services.

While the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps will all use versions of the jet, the three services are failing to cooperate on sharing their data with each other. The GAO recommends that the Pentagon resolve the problem. The military concurs with the recommendation.

“The Marine Corps records F-35 aircraft operational lessons learned on its own service-specific website, but the Department of Defense (DOD) does not formally share these lessons across the military services,” GAO report states. “Instead, Marine Corps officials stated that they currently rely on personal relationships to share lessons learned with other services, through methods such as phone calls to colleagues in the Air Force or the Navy.”

The Air Force and Navy have the same issue with their F-35 units. “Air Force and Navy officials told GAO that they document lessons learned from F-35 deployments in the form of after action reports or observational briefings,” the GAO report states. “However, the F-35 program does not currently disseminate or make available lessons learned across all services, although program officials agreed that doing so would be beneficial.”

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The Pentagon has previously stated that operational lessons from F-35 operations need to be shared across the services. “DOD has emphasized the need for the services to collect and share lessons learned not only at a service-specific level, but across all services, and it established the Joint Lessons Learned Program in 2000 to enhance joint capabilities through knowledge management in peacetime and wartime,” the GAO report states. “Joint Lessons Learned Program guidance discusses the importance of not only capturing lessons learned, but communicating lessons learned through a range of mechanisms to properly institutionalize those lessons, effectively enable joint force capabilities, and enhance interagency and multinational coordination. The goal is to prevent lessons learned from being captured in a vacuum within each military service, but rather to have them captured and shared among the joint force to create, among other things, better doctrine, policy, training, and education.”

Thus far, sharing operational lessons cross the services has not happened. “The Marine Corps has internally documented lessons learned from its F-35-related operational activities, but DOD does not formally share these lessons learned across all services participating in the F-35 program,” the GAO stated. “Given that the F-35 program plans to rapidly expand over the next few years and that all three services plan to deploy and operate in the Pacific, now is the time for DOD to make sure that lessons learned are communicated effectively across all services. Without a communications mechanism, the services are at risk of not having access to key information that could affect their movements, exercises, operations, and sustainment of the aircraft in the Pacific and in other areas where they operate.”

In an attached letter, the Defense Department concurred with the GAO recommendations.

Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.