You also make me laugh. For you are so drunk on hating the west that you can't even fathom (or care to look up) that these are their actual air force with the first replacements coming in only beginning this year.
Sure, all these stupid Westerners not giving their armies away is really despicable... if you are an idiot.
F-16s are great, don’t get me wrong, but what they need are Grippens from Sweden.
We design the F-16 with our own needs, capabilities and doctrines in mind. It’s a warplane designed for us. While it comes with all the bells and whistles you could want, it’s also extremely demanding to field and maintain. You need a large, secure airbase to use them from. This means Russia is always going to have an idea where the F-16s are, because there’s only so many places they can possibly be.
The Grippen was designed as more of a guerilla warplane. You can hide it in a forest, keep it maintained with a handful of guys and a truck, and launch it from a random highway. You never know where a Grippen might be.
This heightened flexibility is exactly what Ukraine needs right now in a warplane. And we (Americans) just never bothered to design one like that for ourselves, because it wouldn’t do us any good. What would we use them for, asides giving them to Ukraine? Sweden already has one, designed, produced and tested.
Sure, in an ideal world they'd use Gripens instead of F-16s but in our actual world, where there are about 15 times as many F-16s as there are Gripens, availability matters more than fit.
Ideal and actual are drifting a little closer together after Sweden dangling their recent offer.
Ukraine can only work with so many F-16s, if we somehow gave them 50,000, you would not see large wings of them flying Ukrainian skies, because the planes and pilots just aren’t enough. There’s a whole infrastructure around them that is completely necessary and that takes years to build up.
So, don’t get me wrong. F-16s are great and I’m glad they’re going, but they are not a viable solution to Ukrainian problems. They’ll help some. The Grippen could be an actual solution, even in fairly small numbers due to its highly unique capabilities.
If they landed (in a non-emergency) in NATO countries and more importantly took off from there, then that country would obviously be an active participant in the war. Also voiding NATO Article 5 protection because you can't claim to be attacked when you voluntarily joined the fight.
I think they need Vipers for SEAD. Gripens may be able to mount HARMs but effective SEAD is way more than just a missile. During Gulf War 1 they had to use phantoms and intruders for SEAD because vipers and hornets couldn’t support the mission yet.
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