Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Durch Prime Minister Mark Rutte are all smiles announcing Netherland’s transfer of all its F-16s to Ukraine

Big news and lots of happy pictures, as the Dutch and the Danes both confirmed they would be transferring their entire F-16 fleets to Ukraine. But nothing is currently driving more misunderstanding, distrust, anger, frustration, and impossible expectations on pro-Ukrainian spaces than the eventual delivery and use of F-16s to the front. So that’s what we’ll focus on today’s update.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in the Netherlands today for the big announcement, touring the Dutch Air Force base in which its F-16s are based.

Zelenskyy’s Telegram channel says 42 F-16s will be sent, which is the Netherlands’ entire supply, including a dozen that had been “provisionally” sold to another country.

Zelenskky then went to Denmark for the second big announcement, where another 19 F-16s were promised to Ukraine.

Note that these are all 1970s-era airframes but fully upgraded to the AM/BM standard, which means their electronics closely approximate the latest versions. Both countries had already phased them out in favor of modern F-35s (the new NATO standard).

These announcements culminated a year of extensive lobbying by Zelenskyy and his government for modern NATO aircraft, and mean that Ukraine will have at least 61 F-16s. All eyes will now turn to Norway, which just retired 57 F-16s for its own transition to the F-35. Twelve of them have been sold to Draken International, a private US-based group that, according to Wikipedia, “offers airborne adversary support (Red Air), Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), Close Air Support (CAS), flight training, threat simulation, electronic warfare support, aerial refueling, research, and testing services to the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. defense contractors and aerospace firms, provided by a fleet of former military aircraft.”

If you’re wondering why the U.S. Air Force can’t handle those tasks itself, instead of outsourcing to a private military contractor, Join the club. In any case, they are the largest private operator of military aircraft in the world.

Even assuming that sale is irrevocable, that still leaves Norway with 45 F-16s it could transfer to Ukraine.

No other European country has F-16s available. The Greeks and Turks have massive fleets … pointed at each other. Belgium’s F-35s don’t arrive until 2024-25. Several Eastern European nations have upgraded to F-16s from their old Soviet junk, and can’t give up their new aircraft.

Some of the largest F-16 fleets are actually in the Middle East, but Israel and Egypt (among others) haven’t been the helping kind, and are pointing those weapons at each other anyway. Taiwan and South Korea face active threats, so they can’t help out. So that leaves … us.

The U.S. doesn’t have any up-to-date spares sitting anywhere in storage. The famous “boneyard” in the Arizona desert has an unspecified number of old F-16s, but they’ve been sitting in the desert for decades and would require complete overhauls and updates. It took Boeing 12 years to refurbish 75 obsolete boneyard F-16s back to flying status. Those were made into unmanned target drones, which might even be easier to refurbish since they didn’t need modern systems installed.

The U.S. does have about a thousand F-16s on active duty, so maybe a dozen or two could be spared? In total, the ceiling for Ukraine seems to be around 100 F-16s.

But now, the challenges.

First of all, Ukraine could only muster up eight pilots for initial training. Turns out, you need to speak English to read the manuals and receive instruction in NATO’s official language. (French is also an official NATO language, but really, it’s just English.) Ukraine has gotten by using translators for other kind of systems training, like HIMARS rocket artillery and Patriot air defenses, but you can’t have a translator up with you in a single-seat jet fighter while receiving instructions from ground crews and instructors. Apparently, no one in Ukraine thought it would be helpful to begin a large-scale English-language training effort for key personnel.

Now that training manuals have been officially authorized for Ukraine, they are undoubtedly in the process of translating them for the next batch of pilots, who will almost certainly be trained by these initial eight. Great! But that means that these initial eight won’t be flying combat missions. They’ll be training the rest of the necessary pilots, further delaying their introduction into the battlefield. No one can blame the West for that.

That’s not stopping a hysterical strain of commentary claiming that training pilots is somehow a Western scheme to further sabotage Ukraine.

This is so ridiculous, I can’t even.

One, it’s a weird assumption that there are “retired” pilots ready to go fight a near-peer hot war. Why would they? They’re all flying for Draken International, or, you know, they’re retired. How many are ready and willing to die for another nation? We would know if there was, indeed, a huge pool of experienced fighters ready to join the Ukrainian Air Force Foreign Legion, and there are undoubtedly some. But to assume that retired pilots are lining up to die for Ukraine is ludicrous.

But even more ridiculous, it’s amazing to me that a year and a half into this war, people still don’t understand that logistics is the game. The pilot is the easy part! For land forces, I’ve written several times how only 15% of a fighting force actually pulls a trigger or pushes a button firing a weapon. The bulk of an army is truck drivers, mechanics, electronic maintenance, medics, armorers, supply clerks, command and control, cooks, etc. For something as complex as an F-16? It’s even more lopsided.

This excellent thread by Norwegian pilot Justin Bronk, a Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Military Technology at RUSI, London. and a Professor at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy, explains in some detail the challenges in operating the F-16.

A thread on the US approval for #F16 transfer to #Ukraine once pilot training is complete: This US decision is important as it clears one of the obstacles to delivery from European operators – US authorisation as the original manufacturer. Several issues remain, however: (1/10)

The first is who will service and turn the jets once in country? F-16 is a complex aircraft and the airframes likely to be sent are quite old. Even on high risk timeframes it will take years to train journeyman or master level maintainers who can supervise and assure. (2/10)

This means that just like any other FMS customer that the US has helped set up with an F-16 fleet, there will be a heavy reliance on civilian contractors to supervise and provide on-the-job training to Ukrainian maintainers in-country, even after months of initial training (3/10)

We’ve discussed it in the past—initial training is just the first step in any soldier/sailor/airman’s military career. Non-commissioned officers (NCOs, like sergeants) with decades of combined experience are critical in teaching new soldiers how to properly do their jobs. Just think of someone coming out of college, being further trained in their career by experienced managers, and perfecting their craft over years and decades. No one is an expert after the first round of training/education. It is impossible to perfect anything of real value in a few months, no matter how motivated.

Just look at Ukraine’s inability to execute combined arms maneuvers in their counteroffensive. They spent several months in Germany over the winter and spring practicing combined arms, but that wasn’t anywhere near enough time. The most experienced NATO units struggle with combined arms maneuvers even when drilling it constantly.

So yes, it is literally impossible to maintain those systems without a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. I don’t see any realistic scenario in which those complex Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine aren’t mostly maintained by civilian contractors, playing the role of NCOs as Ukrainian soldiers hone their craft under their guidance. The alternative is that the batteries are driven across the border to Poland or Romania every time something serious breaks, and that’s not tenable in the middle of a war.

This is an issue because any F-16 bases set up inside Ukraine will be priority targets for Russian cruise and ballistic missile strikes. Therefore, more ground support equipment and contractors are needed to enable dispersed basing, and they’ll still be actively targeted (4/10)

This increases the political risk of Western contractors being killed by Russian strikes and in any case the US Administration has a ‘no boots on the ground in Ukraine’ policy, so no US contractor support is likely without a major policy change there.  (5/10)

Not sure how the U.S could limit the presence of American contractors. Heck, there are entire units of Ukrainian Foreign Legion made up of American ex-soldiers (usually seen grouped with Canadians and Brits, because of the language kinship). It does mean that American companies likely won’t be allowed to take on maintenance contracts, but that’s easy enough to work around.

But, note the massive support requirements—50 personnel per aircraft. I’d be surprised if there were that many Americans serving in the foreign legion altogether, and it’s easier to find an ex-infantryman than it is to find an ex technician proficient in one of the many highly specialized tasks required to maintain this complex aircraft.

The F-16s likely to be sent are Dutch, Danish and Norwegian, but those air forces need their own F-16 maintainers + contractors to retrain on F-35 to support their current fleets. Thus, where the required maintainers come from is a key question that is so far unanswered (6/10)

The Twitterati think this is easy. People are magically available to do everything from flying the planes, to maintaining its complex radar systems, to maintaining the jet engine, to everything else! But no, it’s not.

The West didn’t slow walk the release of complex systems to Ukraine for shits and giggles. It did so because it’s complicated. An M113 is a 1960s-era piece of crap armored personnel carrier, but the most junior mechanic can maintain it. An M2 Bradley is a last-generation infantry fighting vehicle, and worlds-better than the M113s it replaced, but it comes at an additional logistical and maintenance cost.

Same with tanks, from Eastern European nations delivering the last of their Soviet-era junk, to Leopard tanks, to M1 Abrams coming soon to a battlefield in Ukraine. Bolstering their supply of Soviet-era gear required no additional skills. But each new Western system is a heavy burden, forcing Ukraine to significantly ramp up its logistical capabilities, all the while maintaining dozens of foreign weapons systems (something no other army is required to do). And it needs to do this all in the middle of a war. This shit is hard! And it can’t all be done at once.

Another key question is how to finance this in the near term. F-16 is cheap by Western fast jet standards but is still very expensive. Essential US support would have come out of the limited Presidential Drawdown Authority budget for military support to Ukraine as a whole (7/10)

Given a lack of European capacity, the key is finding a way to support Ukrainian Air Force to set up and sustainably operate F-16s without unacceptably drawing finite PDA budget away from more critical supplies of artillery, ammunition, tanks, IFVs, Patriot missiles etc.(8/10)

This is a big challenge, and an underreported one.

An F-16 cost $27,000 to fly for one hour.

And each hour it flies, it requires 17 man-hours of maintenance. These older Dutch and Danish F-16s might require even more maintenance, given they entered service in 1979 and 1980, respectively, so over 40 years old.

That’s not including the cost of ordinance.

War is expensive. A U.S. Army combat brigade—60 Abrams, 60 Bradley IFVs and 112 M113, costs $67,000 per mile. And those are estimates from a decade ago when fuel was cheaper. But when the budget is limited, hard decisions have to be made.

It will also take significant time to train Ukrainian pilots as formation leaders to execute the complex 4-8 ship tactics required for the F-16 to operate effectively near the frontline under the concurrent threats of Russian layered SAM systems and fighter CAPs with R-37M (9/10)

Lastly, the weapons given will be critical to how effective an F-16 fleet can be. Key items like the long ranged AIM-120D variant of AMRAAM and JASSM standoff missile have yet to be approved, and may be deemed too sensitive to risk Russian (and Chinese) capture/ analysis (10/10).

Back to training. Tweet nine is directly analogous to the “combined arms” conundrum. You can train soldiers to perform simple individual tasks. But ask them to work as part of an orchestrated greater whole, and shit quickly falls apart. Ukraine was unable to quickly learn how to combine its infantry, artillery, engineering, air (drones), armor, intelligence, electronic warfare, and logistics into one effective fighting machine. The best it can manage is infantry assaults preceded by an artillery barrage. Armor comes in to soften defensive positions beforehand. Engineers come out at night and de-mine fields in the dark. Drones do their own thing, irrelevant what anyone else is doing. Heck, they’ve got HIMARS rocket artillery hitting random training grounds out in the rear instead of prepared Russian defensive positions on the front lines.

Combined arms is hard work, and it was never reasonable to expect Ukraine to learn it over the winter or spring.

Same thing here—flying a plane is one thing. Flying it in proper formation is another thing. And to maximize its effectiveness, the F-16 needs to fly in groups, each plane fulfilling a different-but-critical mission like suppressing enemy radar, targeting enemy air defenses, protecting against enemy fighter jets, and performing whatever mission they’re actually carrying out (whether it’s close air support of ground forces, or taking out Russian warships, or attacking the Kerch Bridge).

If history is any guide, we’ll end up seeing what we already see with the Ukrainian air force—lone planes (or at most, a pair) carrying out singular missions, unable to perform the complex combined maneuvers needed to best perform their tasks.

That’s not to say that there isn’t value to the F-16, even in the short term. I want to see them take out the Black Sea Fleet with their Harpoons and open up the shipping corridors out of Odesa in the Black Sea (the ships just need to get to Romanian territorial waters and they’re home free). In addition, F-16s can more effectively deploy HARM anti-radar missiles than the way they’ve been jury-rigged on MiG-29s—the more degraded Russia’s air defenses are, the better Ukraine’s drones will be able to do their thing at the front.

But I would also love to see Ukraine field several brigades of M1 Abrams tanks, with hundreds of infantry fighting vehicles in support. It’s clear Ukraine needs more heavy armored brigades. I want to see Ukraine get longer-range missiles like ATACMS, which replace many of the tasks that a NATO Air Force performs (like hitting logistics and bridges in the deep rear).

I’d like to see Ukraine’s Territorial Defense forces better trained up. There are still reports of many of them getting 2-3 weeks of “training” before being shipped off to the front. That’s right, it’s not just Russia rushing mobilized soldiers to the front.

None of that is incompatible with the incoming F-16s, but would prove far more valuable in retaking lost territory than 100 F-16s (at best) ever will, and likely cost less in the end.

Ukraine’s budget isn’t infinite. We can all wish it was, and argue that it should be, but the political reality is what it is, and Russia is banking that the longer this goes on, the more restless Western governments will become in funding Ukraine’s military. We see it domestically with Donald Trump and his people’s more aggressive support for Putin and Russia’s annexation of significant chunks of Ukraine. It’s happening in countries all around Europe. Thus far, it hasn’t worked, but time isn’t on our side.

That’s why everyone should be focused on what Ukraine needs to win now, and less on capabilities that will have limited impact on taking ground, and won’t even come online until next year.

Assuming the is true, this is a big deal:

These are the strategic bombers launching devastating cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities. Take them out.

750 kilometers? The only way that was a quadcopter is if it was launched locally by infiltrators, a very real possibility. If it came from Ukrainian territory, it would’ve have to be a fixed-wing done.