At War on the Rocks Mike Pietrucha makes a pretty good case that sending F-16s to Ukraine is at best a distraction:
The foundation of an airpower capability is fundamentally people, not hardware. An aircraft, of whatever type, does not grant a capability unless it is flown by capable and trained individuals, competently maintained, and adequately supported. Ukraine’s air force is not a fledgling air force; it operates fixed and rotary wing aircraft that perform airlift, counterair, and ground attack missions. It has a 30-year history of using and modifying legacy Soviet aircraft, and Ukraine has its own aviation industry. Ukraine has managed to maintain a force despite horrific losses in the early days, and has even managed to add new defense-suppression capabilities, enabled by MiG-29 Fulcrum carrying American-supplied AGM-88 High Speed Antiradiation Missiles. But it does not operate Western aircraft and it never has. By necessity, its training programs, tools, support equipment, and experience base are entirely based on three decades of independent operations with Soviet legacy aircraft, which were designed to support a Soviet style of airpower employment, not a Western one. The Soviets operated their airpower under centralized control, primarily in support of the ground component, while Western airpower embraces aviator initiative and utilizes airpower for a wide range of missions beyond just flying artillery.
Switching over to Western aircraft is possible, of course, and Ukraine is an excellent candidate for doing so. But the provision of Western fighters like the F-16 is not an evolutionary step; it is a revolutionary step that will require the Ukrainian air force to start from scratch. Ukraine has experience operating single-mission aircraft — their interceptors like the MiG-29 Fulcrum have only a rudimentary ground attack capability, and their Su-24 Fencer and Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft have no air to air capability at all. The F-16 has evolved into a capable multirole fighter that has no parallel in the ex-Soviet aviation enterprise.
All it would take is time and the people to train to fly and maintain the craft. Sounds to me like procuring old Soviet aircraft would actually be a better choice.
F-16’s to Ukraine puts us right on the edge of WW III. Would the air bases be in Poland? What if the Russians bomb the air bases?
Is it not bizarre that none, not one, of these “experts” ever considers the Russian response? That all of them, each and every one, thinks that NATO bases are permanently off the table? That no facility in the US (Whiteman AFB?) is a possible target?
Anyway, it looks like 2 years of training before Ukrainian pilots get to use them in combat.
In real news today, Russian has withdrawn from NEW START. That means we have no nuclear related treaties in force with Russia. Russia has reserved the right to restart nuclear bomb testing, if we do.
“The Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty was signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963, by US Secretary Dean Rusk, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home—one day short of the 18th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/nuclear-test-ban-treaty
Just shy of 60 years later, and now there none.
It is to weep.
We have been training the pilots of other nations to fly the F-16 for along time and this would be a group of very experienced pilots. How long it would take would depend upon what role you want to use the planes for and how many different kinds of roles. Also, the Ukraine military has shown itself to be much more capable than people thought. A year ago I think the very large majority of people thought Russia would run over Ukraine but they have fought well and fought smart and have successfully integrated arms and supplies from many other countries. So not sure how long it would take to train, but probably a lot shorter than most people think.
Steve
Bob,
We’d be giving them the F-16’s, so they’d be based in Ukraine and flown by Ukrainians. It’s the same basic concept as giving them tanks, apc’s, artillery, etc.
The problem with relying on Soviet aircraft is that they are now very old, and Russia controls most of the parts supply. Aircraft also wear out like anything else. You can extend the life with depot-level maintenance and things like replacing wings and avionics, but again, Russia controls most of that. All of which makes western aircraft compelling and probably inevitable.
But that isn’t going to change much for the war. Airpower is not a significant factor because both sides have robust ground-based air defenses and lack the ability to do suppression/destruction of those air defense systems to gain air superiority, much less air dominance. The F-16 doesn’t change anything in that regard.