The F-16s provided to Ukraine in the coming weeks cannot deliver instant air superiority over Russia’s robust Russian air defenses, but they will allow Kyiv to transition to a Western-style air force and better employ U.S. munitions, the U.S. Air Force’s top general in Europe said July 30.
“It’s not going to be the … golden bullet, that all of a sudden, they have F-16s, and now they’re going to go out and gain air superiority,” said U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa Commander Gen. James B. Hecker during a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. “It’s the integrated air and missile defense systems that they’re going up against.”
Those air defense systems are among the most effective anywhere, he said. “We have a hard time with fifth-generation aircraft going against that,” Hecker explained. “But it does move them a step in the right direction.”
Western allies have signaled the imminent arrival of F-16s for weeks, but to date no aircraft have been acknowledged to be in Ukraine. The Netherlands and Denmark are providing the first of those jets, and Belgium and Norway have also pledged to provide F-16s.
Plans for maintaining and arming those aircraft have been less clear. The Wall Street Journal reported July 30 that Ukraine will be getting:
- AIM-120 AMRAAM and AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missiles
- AGM-88 HARM anti-radiation missiles
- JDAM Extended-Range and Small-Diameter Bombs
“They already have them,” Hecker said in an apparent reference to the air-to-surface munitions, though he did not say precisely which weapons Kyiv would receive for its Vipers. “They’re just dropping them off Mig-29s and Su-24s. Now they’re going to have the opportunity to actually drop them off of an airplane that they were designed to come off of, which will give them more capability to change the targets in flight and things like that.”
Ukraine has jerry-rigged HARMs to its Russian-built aircraft to target radar sites but without the ability to change targets dynamically. Advanced weapons targeting pods on F-16s would enable HARMs to be employed more flexibly with greater precision, though whether Ukraine will receive those devices is unclear. Even a basic F-16 provides an upgrade over Ukraine’s current aircraft.
“That’s going to increase the capability,“ Hecker said.
Kyiv’s current stockpile of AMRAAMs and AIM-9s have been adapted as surface-to-air interceptors for use by air defense systems—though the U.S. has not said which variants it has provided. While Hecker did not specifically discuss air-to-air weapons, Air & Space Forces Magazine previously reported that AMRAAMs would be an option for Ukraine’s F-16s.
Also unclear is whether the U.S. and its allies will authorize Ukraine to target sites in Russia with its new weapons. The U.S. has only allowed Ukraine to use American weapons inside Russia in limited cases.
What is known is that armaments are coming. “Commitments have been made by multiple countries … to provide the ammunition that is necessary to equip the F-16s,” Belgium’s Prime Alexander De Croo told Air & Space Forces Magazine in mid-July during the NATO summit. “This is a major step forward.”
Maintenance
Hecker didn’t provide details about Ukraine’s maintenance plans, offering only that “We have a good way forward to make that happen.” The U.S. and other Western countries are training F-16 pilots and maintainers.
So far, the U.S. plans to train a total of 12 Ukrainian pilots this fiscal year, as well as “dozens” of maintainers.
For now, Russia and Ukraine are hamstrung in the air.
“Quite honestly, they’re doing a lot of the things that Ukraine is doing,” Hecker said of the Russian Air Force. “Come in, low altitudes, getting below the radars, popping up, dropping off a glide bomb, and then exiting. So that’s kind of the tactics that both sides have resorted to just because of the advanced integrated air and missile defense systems that are on both sides.”
This mutual denial has prevented Russia from stopping the flow of Western arms into Ukraine, Hecker said. “If they had air superiority, they would be ‘capping’ over the borders of Poland and Romania and Ukraine. Anything that comes in that the 50 allies have donated, they’d be doing close air support, taking all that stuff out. But they don’t have air superiority, so they can’t do it,” he said.
Ukrainian Air Force capabilities should be measured over the long term, Hecker said. Ukrainian pilots have trained with the 162nd Wing of the Arizona Air National Guard at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson since October, the Air Force’s F-16 foreign pilot training unit. While U.S. training has been tailored to individual pilots, the unit focuses on training pilots in the six-month “B-Course”—or Basic Course. U.S. officials have said the training was adapted and lengthened to give the Ukrainian pilots more time to become proficient. While several pilots have graduated from training in Tucson and moved on to training in Europe, these pilots are all still new to F-16 and the tactics they need to know to be effective.
“This is a pretty big one,” Hecker said. “All that equipment comes with Western training, which is a cultural shift for somebody who was trained by the Russians years ago, and that takes time. You know, a seven-month course on how to fly an F-16 isn’t going to change that culture overnight, and we’ve seen that with other Eastern Bloc countries that now are members of NATO.”
Poland struggled to transition from Soviet-era jets to single-engine, multi-role F-16s, but ultimately became an effective NATO partner. The change in mindset from the Soviet-style to Western doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures has a steep learning curve, he said.
“We’ve started that transition to Western TTPs, to Western doctrine, to Western equipment, and they’re going to be much better off and a much better supporter and partner once they mature with all these capabilities that we’re giving them,” Hecker said. “But it’s not going to be overnight. This is talking about half a decade or decades to get to that point. But we started the clock, and I think that’s a good start.”