Volodymyr Zelensky wants American F-16 fighter planes. Joe Biden doesn’t want to let him have them. Who has the better argument? What good or bad would come of supplying them?
Biden’s first reason for not sending them is that the Ukrainians aren’t ready for them. As even Ukrainians admit, their pilots would take at least six months to learn how to fly and fight with the plane. The F-16—a multipurpose jet, capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground operations—also requires fairly pristine runways for takeoff and landing; unlike Soviet-built planes, which were designed to operate from austere bases, F-16s (and many other U.S. planes) can be damaged by objects sucked into their engines; they need to be inspected and maintained almost daily. Ukraine has few pristine airfields, and Russia could bomb those repeatedly, forcing endless rounds of repair.
But Tyler Rogoway, editor of The War Zone website, while acknowledging those points, makes a case for at least preparing to send the planes anyway. In a phone conversation Thursday, he said, “Ukraine isn’t ready to use F-16s in a month, but we don’t know how long this war is going to last, and after it ends, Ukraine is going to need to protect itself. We should start training their pilots and beefing up their airfields now.” Rogoway made the same suggestion in an article back in April; had his advice been followed then, Ukrainian pilots would be ready to fly the planes now.
He also said that it would cost us little, and do the Ukrainian air force no harm, to train some of its pilots on a NATO airbase, for instance in Western Europe, where F-16s are plentiful. “Ukraine has more pilots than it has airplanes,” Rogoway said. “It can remove some from the battlefield.”
Biden’s other concern about sending F-16s is that they would cross a line that Vladimir Putin might regard as a provocation, to which he might respond by escalating the fight. A fully armed F-16 has a range of 500 miles, putting the plane—if it takes off from some of Ukraine’s airbases—within striking distance of targets well inside Russian territory. (ATACMs, an advanced ground-launched tactical missile that Zelensky wants but Biden doesn’t want to give him, has this same feature.) This is not the case with any other weapon the West has given Ukraine. Biden could make Zelensky promise that his pilots would not fly the planes across the Russian border. Zelensky could probably be trusted to abide by the pledge; cheating would severely alienate his main supplier of arms and intelligence. But Putin’s mindset is the main concern here; would he believe the pledge?
This raises two larger questions: Would Putin really regard Ukraine’s mere possession of F-16s as an existential threat? And should we care what Putin thinks? As John Adams famously said, facts are stubborn things, and two facts about Putin are that he’s fast becoming a cornered, desperate tyrant and that he has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons—not a stable combination.
On the other hand: Ukraine has already struck targets inside Russia (and inside Ukrainian districts, including Crimea, that Putin claims are part of Russia), with no escalatory consequences, though the incidents may have spurred Putin to order more intense Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities. The difference is that Ukraine hit those Russian targets with its own missiles (or, in some cases, it seems, with on-the-ground saboteurs). Does it matter if Ukraine were to do this again using American or NATO weapons? Might Putin strike back at the suppliers of those weapons?
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz seems to think so. He was leery of providing German-built Leopard tanks to Ukraine unless and until Biden promised to send U.S. Abrams tanks, because he didn’t want to risk Putin’s wrath on his own. Given Germany’s Cold War history, Scholz is particularly sensitive to the dangers of alienating Moscow; but Biden has expressed the same concerns. At his joint press conference with Zelensky in December, he was asked why he and the other allies didn’t just give Ukraine all the weapons it wanted right now, including long-range aircraft and missiles. Biden replied, “They’re not looking to go to war with Russia. They don’t want to start World War III.”
In a way, this is unfair. Russia has been attacking targets—civilian and military—inside Ukraine; but, with few exceptions, Ukraine has foregone (and, when it comes to using Western weapons, has been instructed to forego) attacking targets inside Russia. (The few targets that Ukraine has hit inside Russia were all military in nature.) Still, this is the nature of nuclear deterrence. Possessing nuclear weapons deters adversaries from launching a wide range of attacks, not just nuclear ones. To the Ukrainians, this is a “total war,” worth nearly any sacrifice. To us, it cannot be; the moment that NATO countries come under attack, especially if they suffer casualties, is probably the moment that those countries pull out of the war. This is tacitly but widely understood.
Still, against these risks, the benefits of letting Ukraine have F-16s should be measured—so what are those benefits? In the short term, there are no benefits. As noted earlier, if the planes were sent tomorrow, Ukrainian pilots would not be ready to fly them.
What about the medium to long term? The F-16—which the U.S. has sold or given to more than two dozen countries in and out of NATO—is superior to the Soviet-built fighters; it has better radar, better maneuverability, and can carry more missiles of more destructive power and longer range. But it’s unclear how much these advantages would matter in this conflict. There hasn’t been much of an air war in Ukraine lately; neither side has flown combat planes far forward of their front lines, because they know that the other side could shoot the planes down with its dense layers of air-defense weapons (and, in several cases, have shot them down).
Instead, both sides have aimed to destroy enemy troop concentrations or other targets by firing rockets, missiles, and long-range artillery from launch pads on the ground—which also happen to be cheaper, more reliable, and less vulnerable than fighter planes.
And so that is where the Biden administration has placed its priorities, sending Ukraine thousands of missiles and rockets, and millions of rounds of ammunition. The latest $2 billion arms package includes, for the first time, Small-Diameter Bombs (SDBs)—extremely accurate weapons with a range of 90 miles, twice as long as any other weapons the U.S. has sent so far.
Still, Rogoway argues, this new bomb doesn’t render F-16s superfluous. Ukraine could use the F-16’s still longer-range features to shoot down Russian planes and other targets behind the frontlines (though, he emphasizes, still inside Ukraine, not crossing the Russian border, which, he agrees, would be irresponsible). The F-16’s radar can identify and track targets with greater precision at longer distances. And their weapons pods can hold Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), extremely accurate bombs that explode with forces up to 2,000 pounds. This is much more powerful than the bombs on the long-range HiMARS rockets or Small-Diameter Bomb. “With a 2,000-pound JDAM, you could destroy a hardened Russian command center from 35 miles out,” Rogoway said. “Nothing Ukraine now has can do that.”
Even so, he acknowledges that MiG-29s can be modified to carry JDAMs as well as some of the other munitions and electronics that the F-16 holds. The U.S. has helped some of the eastern European NATO allies—for instance, Slovenia—modify their old Soviet-built planes in this way.
However, at some point, Ukraine will run out—or at least run short—of those Soviet-built planes. It isn’t quite clear how many usable planes they have now—perhaps a few dozen. Some former Soviet allies, now members of NATO, notably Poland, want to give Ukraine their MiG fighters, in hopes of getting the U.S. to replace them with the most modern F-35 planes. (Some reports say that Washington blocked Poland from sending MiGs to Ukraine; others that Poland has already sent some.)
This may be the key issue for Zelensky. Most of the eastern European NATO members are acquiring Western weapons, in order to integrate their armed forces into the alliance. Whether or not Ukraine joins NATO, Zelensky wants to be inside that supply chain.
John Pike, director of the research firm GlobalSecurity.org, makes the same point: “Over the next two years, Ukraine is going to have NATO fighters, simply due to combat attrition. Why don’t we go ahead and help them win now rather than drag things out?”
Either way one looks at this issue, it is not an urgent matter. It is also not a huge matter. Zelensky has said he needs 200 modern Western jet fighters, but the spokesman for Ukraine’s air force, Yuri Ignat, recently said just two F-16 squadrons of 12 planes each, plus spares—around 30 planes in all—would be enough to turn the tide against Russian air power.
The Ukrainian president has reason to believe that any American weapon he requests, he’ll eventually get. Biden was initially hesitant (as were other Western leaders) to supply Patriot air-defense missiles, then armored vehicles, then Abrams tanks—yet, one by one, he flashed the green light. It’s possible (some Pentagon officials say it’s likely) that, at some point soon, he’ll let Ukraine have some modern combat aircraft too.
This whole controversy may get resolved the same way as the dispute over whether to provide Ukraine with modern tanks. Scholz wouldn’t send German Leopard 2 tanks unless Biden sent U.S. Abrams tanks first. Biden agreed to send 31 Abrams, enough for one Ukrainian tank battalion—giving Scholz political cover to send Leopards and allow the many Western buyers of Leopards to do the same. This time around, Biden might eventually agree to send 24 or so F-16s, spurring other allies to send their F-16s, MiGs, and French Mirage fighter planes on top.
Mark Galeotti, executive director of Mayak Intelligence and author of Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, said in an email, “I can’t help but wonder if this is in part Kyiv’s usual gambit of making a long ask, precisely in order to secure something else as ‘compensation’ when that is denied.”
