What Ukrainian F-16s Mean For The West
What Ukrainian F-16s Mean For The West
According to Clausewitz
When the Biden White House stopped procrastinating about getting started on the long process of training up Ukrainian F-16 pilots and crew last May, I said that “the effects of the F-16 will be immediate — and lasting.” I did not say that it would change everything. No weapon is ever an actual Wunderwaffen, least of all a single engine jet designed in the 1970s. Rather, the F-16 brings new capabilities to the Ukrainian Air Force (UAF). The relative handful of planes now can potentially become a substantial number within 15 months if the political will exists.
These F-16s are equipped with either AN/APG-66(V)2 or AN/APG-68(V)9 radars, both pulse-Doppler sets with considerable range. Being donated by Denmark, they come with custom defensive upgrades from Israeli firm Elbit: Pylon Integrated Dispensing System Plus (PIDS+) to fire flares and chaff along with an Electronic Combat Integrated Pylon System Plus (ECIPS+). This latter component includes an AN/ALQ-162 surface-to-air radar jammer and an AN/AAR-60 missile warning system. Better protection for a fourth-generation fighter jet is simply not available.
Still, like I said last May, “Ukraine will absolutely lose F-16s and pilots in them. Take that as a given.” Attrition is a given. These airplanes are consumables, not collectibles. Sustainment will be the decisive factor in how much the F-16 effects the battlefield, and for how long.
That the F-16 remains formidable in the 21st century is a testament to the power of technological upgrades which delay obsolescence. Equipped with targeting pods such as Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night (LANTIRN), the Ukrainian planes are expected to do most of their flying at night. The AGR-20 Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) is paired with the AN/AAQ-33 Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod (ATP) to fill a counter-UAS role. Shahed and Orlan drones will be defenseless against it.
Russian warplanes have not been able to penetrate Ukrainian airspace throughout this invasion. Russian aviation has provided close air support to ‘meatwave’ attacks, notably with gliding bomb munitions. This will be far more dangerous for Russian pilots when F-16s are able to reach them well behind, and from far beyond, the line of contact. Ukraine has been supplied with the AIM-9 family of air-to-air missiles as well as longer-range AIM-120B/C missiles, and they are supposed to receive the newest AIM-120C8 version this fall.
What this all means, in non-Tom Clancyesque language, is that Ukrainian F-16s can provide air defense and close air support from higher altitudes with planes that are ready-made for advanced western weapons. As noted above, the only variable left to account for in measuring their impact on the battlefield is the political will of the western partners who supply Ukraine.
A more fundamental meaning the reader should take from the example of the F-16 is that the reader is reading this sentence instead of dying in a hellish, radioactive post-apocalyptic landscape.
The delivery of F-16s was supposed to trigger nuclear catastrophe, according to the Kremlin and its publicists. Like the delivery of M-1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine — a system now reappearing on the battlefield, having been adapted to its conditions — or the arrival of ATACMS, the F-16 is another supposed red line that the West has crossed without incurring the threatened nuclear response from Russia. This nuclear bullying has a name in strategic studies: reflexive control.
The strategic meaningfulness of the F-16 is that western policymakers let the nuclear saber-rattling get to them. This concern in the Biden administration delayed the arrival of F-16s until now. Republicans who buy into the myth of infinite Russian resources will seek to delay or cut off supply of spare parts and ammunition. Meanwhile, China watches the West to see whether it is capable of addressing the deficiencies of its many national defense industrial bases, separately or together, to decide whether they can cross the Taiwan Strait. Donald Trump rejects multilateralism, the diplomatic predicate to collective security, altogether. Military procurement is incompatible with the degrowth agendas of the progressive left as well.
Ukrainian F-16s are perfect avatars of the political questions over Ukraine support and its subsidiary issues in every nation-state that supports Ukraine. War is policy, according to Clausewitz, and so the way the West answers this question will determine what impact they have, and for how long.
Crimea will be the scene of action now. If F-16s are flying over the peninsula, rampaging over whatever remains of Russian air defences and devastating all attempts at resupply, the West will have to face the startling potential of Ukrainian victory. When Zelenskyy announced “the de-militarization of Crimea” was underway in August 2022, it was already clear to this writer that Ukrainians would use long-range weapons to reduce the defenses in the peninsula. Two years have passed. Ukraine has obtained or developed a combination of drones, drone munitions, and long-range missiles to support the F-16 in an air superiority role over Crimea. Whether or not they are allowed to succeed is entirely up to the West, now.
