As the war has dragged on for two-and-a-half years, the western press is touting the eventual arrival of F-16s in the skies over Ukraine as the decisive factor that will turn the tide of the war against Russia and allow Ukraine to retake all of its lost territory. Although the F-16 is a first-rate weapons platform, it is only the latest in a long string of “game-changing” western weapons that have appeared, and you whose appearance has not lived up to predictions. Consequently, one can be forgiven some skepticism regarding this latest claim.
Although there are several reasons that one can cite for the fact that the war appears to have bogged down into a stalemate, one of the primary ones is that neither side has obtained the sort of overwhelming air superiority necessary to blast a hole in the other’s defensive lines significant enough to allow massive quantities of men and materiel to break through into the enemy’s rear areas. It’s hard to remember now, but the Israeli victory in the 6-Day War in 1967 was preceding by the Israelis largely destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground at the start of the conflict. The routing of Sadaam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait in 5 days in 1991 was preceded by weeks of relentless air attacks on troop concentrations that were largely defenseless from the air. And in Afghanistan in 2001, the Northern Alliance and the Taliban were stuck in what was effectively a stalemate; until the U.S. pulverized the Taliban defensive lines with air power, including carpet bombing with B-52s, something that was only possible because the Taliban had no air defenses to speak of. In contrast, Russia has more effective air defense capabilities than any of these other entities, which is an indication that the effectiveness of the F-16 will likely be less that what it was in in the 1991 & 2003 Gulf Wars and in 2001 Afghanistan.
One of the factors that appears to have been present in predictions that western weapons will turn the tide is the western (American) belief that superior technology can overcome anything. America’s history of war, however, does not really bear this out. America had superior technology in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and in second Gulf War, but it’s hard to say that she really won those wars. Even in World War II, the Germans’ technology could be said in some areas to have been better than ours. However, the technological gap between us and them was not as large as it could have been AND by 1944, we were able to mass-produce tanks, airplanes, ships, etc. in quantities that the Germans had absolutely no way of matching. In addition, Germany was fighting on three fronts, which was further stretching its resources.
In the current conflict in Ukraine, the technology gap between the West and Russia is not as great as the popular press would have one believe. Russia’s battlefield failures up until now are largely failures of military management and Ukrainian ingenuity, rather than abject technological inferiority. In order for a few F-16s to completely change the game in Ukraine, they would have to have a level of technological superiority as if the F-16 was able to go back in time 80 years and appear over the battlefields of World War II. However, the F-16’s level of technological superiority versus Russian weapons systems is not of this magnitude, making current “game-changing” predictions unrealistic.
One of the military factors that appears to have fallen out of favor in western military thought is the concept of mass and attrition as a method of war fighting. In some ways, this is understandable in that the wars that the U.S. has been engaged in over the last 25 years have largely depended on tactical flexibility of lighter infantry units and special forces coupled with air power, rather than mass movement of tanks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Russia’s military doctrine, however, is still heavily influenced by its experience in World War II, its experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s notwithstanding. While American victory in World War II (both in the European theater and the Pacific theater) was secured through the mass production of planes, tanks, and guns, these lessons appear to be have been largely forgotten.
While the F-16 isn’t a superweapon that will technologically dominate the Ukrainian battlefield, masses of F-16s conceivably could change the game in Ukraine. If the West were to build out its production capacity of F-16s, as well as the pilot training necessary to fly them, to where Ukraine had a cadre of several hundred F-16s, the war dynamics would very likely shift in Ukraine’s favor as they would likely achieve theater wide air superiority. Right now, various publications are reporting that Ukraine is set to receive between 80 and 90 F-16s from various European countries. The U.S. will be replacing the F-16s that these countries are donating to Ukraine. Lockheed Martin is the company that produces the F-16, and according to the publication “Defense One”, they are expecting to produce 48 F-16s per year by the end of 2025. And note that not all of these are slated to go to Ukraine; Taiwan and other countries have ordered some as well. One of the reasons that current production capacity is so low is that the U.S. has not purchased any F-16s in many years. However, according to Wikipedia, the U.S. currently has 841 F-16s in active service, with an unknown number in storage. So even with the low productive capacity, there appears to be a source of potential F-16s for Ukraine that could bring their total at some point significantly above the 80 to 90 that they are supposed to be receiving.
However, the other bottleneck for making the F-16s operational is pilot training. According to Politico, there are 20 pilots in training U.S. training facilities expected to graduate by the end of this year. There may be few more graduating from other training facilities in Europe, but the tone of various articles indicate that it is a very low number, perhaps not even an additional 20. Furthermore, Ukraine is stating that it has 30 pilots ready to start training currently, although there doesn’t appear to be enough spaces for them.
In short, it doesn’t appear that Ukraine is going to receive enough F-16s, nor enough pilots to fly them, to achieve theaterwide air superiority of the sort that allowed the U.S. to make short work of the Iraqi army in 1991 and 2003 and for Israel to make short work of the Egyptians in 1967. To be sure, 85 F-16s isn’t nothing, although the point of maximum effectiveness of these planes will be likely delayed due to bottlenecks associated with pilot training. Although, I suspect this bottleneck could be alleviated by hiring recently retired former F-16 pilots looking for a huge payday to fly the planes. That being said, 85 F-16s is likely enough to challenge Russia in the air, possibly achieve local air superiority over certain sectors of the front for a given period of time, and perhaps make further Russian offensive progress in these sectors difficult to impossible. What 85 F-16s are not likely to be able to do is to smash the Russian lines, and thereby enable a new Ukrainian offensive to achieve a strategic breakthrough that allows for significant recapture of territory.
Can western weaponry shift the balance in Ukraine? Only if delivered in overwhelming quantity, which does not yet seem to be the case.
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