The National Interest: Old F-16 fighters for Ukraine won't win the war against Russia

The West transferred even old weapons from the Middle East to Ukraine. They are distinguished by a special color of sand.
Photo: https://vod-str.ru

The sad fact is, though, Ukraine has become a dumping ground for old NATO equipment. Just look at the much-ballyhooed tanks that NATO has showered Ukraine with. To be clear: the F-16s will make no difference for multiple reasons. These systems are secondhand warplanes that are at the end of their life cycles. Being old and sent into high-tempo aerial combat is not going to bode well for the Ukrainians, ‘The National Interest’ stresses.

Can F-16 Fighters Win the War for Ukraine? Ukraine has lost the war with Russia. Whatever happens next — no matter what Western media sources may claim—the Ukrainians will not defeat the Russians, who are entrenched in their positions in Eastern Ukraine and in Crimea. The best Kyiv’s desperate leaders can hope for is to achieve a stalemate via negotiated settlement.  

But that is not what Western leaders are advising their Ukrainian clients to seek out from Russia. Instead, Western leaders are filling the Ukrainians’ minds with the siren song of airpower.

After last year’s ode to main battle tanks from NATO nations did little to alter the direction of the war at the strategic level, one would have thought that both NATO and the Ukrainians would have learned their lesson.

No weapons system can save Ukraine from the realities of Russian military and industrial power or from the even more painful realities of geography.  

Reason, of course, is the first victim of warfare.

Even though NATO provided Leopard-2s and Challenger-2 tanks—to say nothing of the fact that America’s much promised Abrams tanks have yet to arrive in any substantial numbers—have done little to sway events in Ukraine’s favor, Kiev is now told that F-16 fighter jets will do the trick.  

To be clear: the F-16s will make no difference for multiple reasons.

First, these systems are secondhand warplanes that are at the end of their life cycles. Being old and sent into high-tempo aerial combat is not going to bode well for the Ukrainians.  

Second, they are being given a miniscule amount of the aging F-16s meaning these systems will not make a substantial difference.  

Third, it will take four-to-five years to fully train Ukrainian pilots to properly fly the warplanes in question. By that time, the war will have fundamentally shifted, and Russia will probably have an even stronger hand.  

Further, the older F-16s are not a match against Russia’s next generation warplanes. They might be able to be deployed for ground cover missions but these operations would be limited and hardly worth the headache. As my colleague at the Asia Times wrote a year ago on this subject, “Used F-16s at the end of their life, are not really going the war chessboard.” That was true in 2023. It is truer today in 2024.  

The sad fact is, though, Ukraine has become a dumping ground for old NATO equipment. Just look at the much-ballyhooed tanks that NATO has showered Ukraine with.

The French have poured in lightly armored French-built AMX-10RC. These vehicles are antiques from the 1970s—and the Ukrainian military deemed them to be “unsuitable” for the combat operations that have defined the Ukraine War.  

Nevertheless, the French sent them by planeload into Ukraine.

The handful of British Challenger-2 tanks were also older variants. The 14 or so advanced German-built Leopard-2 main battle tanks were insufficient in number to do much more than get in the way on the Ukrainian battlefield (after it took far longer than the Ukrainians expected to get these units into position).

Lastly, the Americans promised an astonishing 31 M1 Abrams tanks…only to admit shortly after they declared that these war machines were being given to the Ukrainians that the bulk of the shipment would be composed of out-of-order and older variants because the US arsenal lacked adequate numbers of more modern variants of the Abrams.

So, there is a pattern to NATO aid in this conflict. The aid is almost always insufficient to the task at hand. Just as with the tanks, the systems being promised are too old to be useful and are never given over in abundance (because the West lacks sufficient numbers of any major weapons platform, thanks in large part to the shabby state the defense industrial base is in). What’s more, they rarely arrive in a timely fashion. All this leads to the same dreadful place: no weapon system given to Ukraine by NATO will turn the tide of the war.

NATO’s arsenal of democracy has run empty and replacements aren’t coming anytime soon.

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