- NATO members Poland and Slovakia have pledged to send Ukraine more MiG-29 jets.
- Ukraine is still seeking to get Western-designed jets, particularly the US-made F-16.
Poland and Slovakia are sending their Soviet-designed MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, promising to give Kyiv a bit of the airpower boost it has long sought. Ukrainian leaders are still seeking Western-made jets, but delivering those aircraft and preparing Ukraine to use them would require considerable training and maintenance — and they wouldn't overcome the challenge posed by Russia's aircraft and air defenses, officials and experts say.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on March 16 that Warsaw would send roughly a dozen of its MiG-29s to Ukraine, with the first four arriving "within the next few days." A day later, Slovakia announced it would send 11 MiG-29 jets, all of which are retired and some of which will be used only for spare parts.
Polish and Slovakian MiG-29s would add to Ukraine's fleet and be familiar to Ukrainian pilots but won't bring much more capability than Ukraine's current MiG-29s. Kyiv continues to push Western countries to provide their jets, with Ukrainian officials often singling out the F-16 — a call echoed by some US lawmakers.
"The Ukrainians have at times asked us for as many as 128 fourth-generation aircraft, a mix of F-15s, F-18s, and F-16s," Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told lawmakers on February 28, adding that President Joe Biden and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussed jets during Biden's visit to Kyiv on February 20.
The Biden administration has said repeatedly that it isn't planning to provide jets. Biden himself said on February 24 that Ukraine "doesn't need F-16s now," and the White House said Poland's announcement "doesn't change our calculus."
Other moves suggest the US is thinking about what it would take to send aircraft to Ukraine. As of early March, two Ukrainian pilots were at a base in Tucson for what a US defense official described as "familiarization event" that involved an assessment of their ability to fly US aircraft, according to NBC News.
But actually sending F-16s or other Western-designed jets to Ukraine will take much more than pilot evaluations, according to Gen. Mark Kelly, the head of Air Combat Command, which organizes and trains combat-ready forces for the US Air Force.
"The real interest I would have is if you see big efforts of not two aviators doing some simulator training and academics in Tucson. If you see 102 young airmen learning the sustainment business of a French Rafale, a Eurofighter Typhoon, any other Western airplane, that's when things get serious," Kelly told reporters at the Air and Space Forces warfare symposium on March 7.
'The hard work'
F-16s would allow Ukrainian pilots to fly more often and to do so with a broader range of weapons and sensors, Kelly said.
"So you have increased sortie rates, increased compatibility with Western weapons," including anti-radar missiles that US engineers scrambled to equip Ukraine's Soviet-designed jets with, Kelly said. "You would have better sensors, better processing power, better aviator awareness, which means you have better aviator survivability."
But maintaining those advantages would require not only extensive training for Ukrainian airmen but also consistent access to resources, from spare parts to hangar space.
If the US or another NATO country elected to supply Ukraine with F-16s, Kelly said his first question would be "what sustainment depot are they going to use? That's hard work. There's a depot in Belgium. There's a depot in Poland, and they must have slots — like hotel rooms, you've got to have reservations to go in there."
Supplies would also have to be tailored to the model, or block, of F-16 being provided. "Is it Block 15? Is it a Block 25? Is it a Block 30? Is Block 40? What is it?" Kelly said. "All that supply chain is really, really the hard work."
John Baum, a senior resident fellow for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said that Ukrainian airfields would also need to be outfitted for the F-16.
"A US-manufactured aircraft, compared to a Russian aircraft, would have very specific ground support equipment needs," Baum, a former F-16 pilot, told Insider. "From a ground personnel training perspective, launch and recovery is just a little bit more complex, but the ground support equipment would be the key. You just need specific equipment to get the airplane off the ground."
Meeting the F-16's airfield needs, including runway length, could be a challenge for Ukraine, which has had to operate its aircraft in a more dispersed manner, often at more austere bases and airstrips, to avoid Russian airstrikes. Those conditions lead some experts to advocate providing more rugged aircraft, like the Swedish-made Gripen.
Ukraine's F-16s would also need periodic phase inspections, usually after several hundred flight hours, which require taking the jet apart and examining or replacing its components. "I don't know where those inventories would exist to where they would have a turnkey solution to have everything that they would need from nose to tail," Baum said.
"There are established countries that have been operating the F-16, including the United States Air Force, for decades that have their own maintenance timeline and supply-chain issues," Baum added.
Conducting extensive inspections and repairs would be challenging because of Russia's ability to attack Ukrainian airfields. "Just think of physical hangar space to be able to take apart an airplane. For some of these phase inspections within the United States that have all the access to all the equipment, they still take six months," Baum said. "I cannot imagine trying to do this within the borders of a war-fighting nation the size of Ukraine."
Support and supplies from the jet's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, would also be "critical," Baum said, but the company already devotes time and resources to supporting the two dozen other countries that operate the F-16.
"There are those logistical challenges of being the newest customer on the block," Baum said. "In this case, you're in an active war zone, and obviously I would assume that they would have some priority, but it isn't going to be an overnight turn-the-switch-on and they'll have access to everything that they need."
'Not out of the woods'
Kahl, the Pentagon official, told lawmakers in February that even "the most expeditious timeline" for delivering F-16s would be the same as the training timeline for that jet: 18 months.
Baum — who was vice president at Draken International, a contractor that provides military aircraft services, including adversary support — said that acquiring the jets, training Ukrainian pilots and maintainers on them, and then transferring them to Ukraine would likely be an 18- to 24-month process.
That process could be altered to get jets to Ukraine for near-term use, but long-term operations would still require extensive training and ongoing provision of supplies.
Baum said experienced pilots would need at least a four-month training cycle to get up to speed on the F-16. Experienced maintainers would likely need a similar amount of time to get familiar with the F-16's distinct hardware and more advanced electronics. "Again, that's just for the short-term of being able to launch or recover aircraft," Baum said.
F-16s could also operate "from more austere locations," Baum added, "but I would say that that would be more of a contingency vs. a norm."
Even if Ukraine received F-16s in the short-term, those jets would still square off against a Russian air force that is not only larger but has more modern aircraft with advanced sensors and weapons.
"It doesn't matter if it's a French Rafale, Eurofighter, F-16, any fourth-gen airplane, the Russian Air Force is still very, very credible in that head-on-head realm," Kelly, the Air Combat Command leader, said on March 7.
Ukraine's new jets would also be flying against Russian air-defense weapons that have claimed dozens of Ukrainian aircraft and continue to contest the airspace around the front lines.
"They're not out of the woods," Kelly said of the Ukrainians. "Just because there's something that was produced in Fort Worth or St. Louis or in France or in Europe doesn't mean they're out of the woods with respect to the lethality of the air-defense systems they face."