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U.S. Air Force F-16 at its international training base in Arizona.
Ukraine is set to receive its long-awaited F-16s later this year after asking for the multirole fighters since the early stages of Russia’s invasion, but the wait is necessary to ensure that the jets can be effective, two key leaders argue.
The first donated Lockheed Martin fighters could arrive as early as this summer, as Ukrainian pilots wrap up training both inside the U.S. and at a European-led training center in Romania. Tod Wolters, who retired as NATO’s supreme allied commander-Europe and head of U.S. European Command in July 2022, said there were strong requests from both inside the U.S. and in Europe to send the jets much faster than the current plan.
“There were many people across the land in the United States and inside of several [European Union] nations that wanted the F-16 to go into Kyiv as soon as possible,” Wolters said during a July 2 Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. Russia’s Air Force can be effective, and “we didn’t want to offer an olive branch of immediate strategic failure to give the Russians an advantage.”
“These systems have to have the maintainability and sustainability in a wartime environment, and then the environment that receives them has to be mature enough to move jets to multiple bases and still be able to maintain them to a degree where they can become airworthy,” Wolters says.
Six months before he retired, Wolters said NATO and the U.S. needed to be ready to donate the aircraft when the time is right. Discussions at that time, however, focused on deliveries after the war to build up Ukraine’s military. Now Ukraine is postured to begin using the F-16s to fight Russia.
Wolters said Ukrainian pilots need the intensive training to be able to effectively fly the aircraft, even if they have extensive experience in other Soviet-era airframes.
“Most people believe you can put an Air Force pilot in the corner of a room and pour some salt and pepper on their head and two seconds later you’ve got a lethal product that can go out and whip the enemy,” he says. “It takes time, it takes training, and that’s what’s been going on in a very heavy-handed manner back in the U.S. and back in many of our European nations.”
Former U.S. Air Force Gen. Jeff Harrigian, who retired in July 2022 as commander of all U.S. Air Forces in Europe, says training is focusing on having Ukrainian pilots develop trust and confidence in the F-16, along with understanding what constraints it will have in the current fight.
“In my mind, this is skin in the game, from not just the U.S. perspective but in NATO nations, which is happening down at the European Training Center in Romania today,” he says. “[This] is a great place where they can come together, have that type of mind meld that will be required to make sure that collectively we understand where they’re at, they understand where they’re at and now they can over time move out smartly.”
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