

F35 is a major maintenance time sink. Something on the order of 10 mechanic-hours of maintenance for every flight hour. I’ve heard it costs something like 12k USD in maintenance just to start the engine and bring it to low idle.
I suspect it would take a lot less than six months to ground a fleet when the spare parts get cut off.
The two words by themselves are not very good English, or any slang idiom I know about.
I agree this sounds threatening, however.