Ukraine: The F-16s are Useless!

the F-16 are soon coming to Ukraine but they're useless and it's not me saying but a high ranking Ukrainian official I really don't [Music] understand so there was an article where an unnamed senior Ukrainian official said that the F-16 were going to be useful last year presumably during the offensive but today they're not particularly relevant so in this video I will try to understand why the Ukrainian High command may think so because right now after all the political Capital spent to create the Coalition that is supplying the aircraft if this was true it would be a cosmic disaster we already discussed the facts related to the F-16 for Ukraine and the link to that video is at the end of this video but anyway I decide to watch that video again it was almost a year ago but I think that the core message is still valid there we made clear that the challenge is not the aircraft itself nor it is the pilot training the challenge is building a westernized Air Force in the middle of a high-intensity [Music] wall during World War II all the major participants evolved their forces at a bre NE Base today the complexity is such that the same fit is an order of magnitude more difficult just for comparison consider the Polish Air Force from the beginning of the training of the first pilots and ground cruise on the F16 to being fully operational it took almost 10 years sure during a war you will cut some corners but a few months are not feasible and even two years that seems to be now the agreed timeline more or less it is too short my original concern was that the only way around was to use Western Personnel whose status was changed to be Ukrainian in somehow the civilian contractors who are needed by all the Air Forces who fly the F-16 would likely not have accepted to work inside Ukraine so the aircraft would have to fly in and out of Ukraine this would carry a huge risk of escalation but luckily this doesn't seem to be the way they have chosen to go however there are news that a dozen Ukrainian Pilots have almost completed their training and they may be ready for mayid 2024 which means that a small number of 16 may become operational in the summer of 2024 the bulk of the aircraft and Equipment will be received by Ukraine and probably deployed in 2025 yes because a good number of the PS chosen by Ukraine to be trained on the F-16 were not experienced Pilots they were young pilots who still needed basic training something that may take many years in Pace time so all of this is well and good but it doesn't explain what these officials had in mind when saying that the aircrafts are not relevant after all the final number of aircraft that Ukraine is going to get is probably between 80 and 90 more than twice the number of aircraft that seem to be available one year ago when I made the first video as I said not all the aircraft are going to arrive straight away the first ones are six units just released by Denmark Belgium and the meanwhile has agreed to join in and donate its own aircraft something that it refus to do at the beginning the Netherlands is giving six more aircraft and other countries have allocated a larger percentage of their available units and the donors will be Norway Denmark the Netherlands and Belgium for a short while it seemed that Greece who is trying to reduce the excessive variety of its Fleet could provide f-16s and Mirage 2000 just a few days ago though this was denied by the Greek minister of defense and this is not everything the ukrainians are eagerly working on the logistics and the infrastructure for example the well-known problem of the runways it seems that the bases will be in Western Ukraine but since the ukrainians have no tankers the aircraft will need staging bases CL closure to the line of combat so these bases will need Works to extend the runways and improve the pavement since the F16 is considered to be quite sensitive to the quality and the cleanliness of the ground surface problem is this will clearly indicate to the Russians where the f-16s are going to operate some measures of concealment will likely be necessary and by the way the news that the us through intermediaries both 81 old Soviet aircraft from Kazakhstan is is less relevant than it seems these are very old aircraft that have been already cannibalized for parts so there is probably not much useful remaining some propose that they can be used as decoys on airfields but well this is it so after doing all this research I still didn't know why Ukrainian top brass think that the f-16s are not relevant so well I made a phone call I really can't tell you who was on the other side of the phone let's call him or her the wise hermit on the top of the mountain the wise hermit on the top of the mountain so listen to my perplexities and answer with just one sentence remember the Le excuse me sir I am slightly concerned about the Direction this video is taking no worries Artis I know what I'm doing okay the last time you said so the toilet exploded sir uh that was just a moderate overflow okay do you realize what it looked like seen from my point of view sir arst never mind okay let me go on please so one possibility is that this is all posture it is not true and they are eagerly waiting for the jet after all they're working on it if it wasn't important they wouldn't and that's a pretty reasonable explanation but the wise hermit on the mountain did not suggest that another thing that he or she did not suggest was to look at zin's begging to get more groundbased air defenses this was vehemently advocated in the past weeks and months and so we made deduct that the ukrainians believe that the brown based air defenses are more important than the aircraft when it comes to defending the airspace there may be truth in this particularly considering the nature of this wall but the aircraft are definitely more flexible you can do a lot more with aircraft I'll bait that operating environment is going to be very very contested but the wise hermit said something different and I couldn't wrap my head around it when finally opening the fridge like it often happens I realized what the hermit was talking about do you remember when there was that story about the leopards and the minefields when the German instructor told Ukrainian TR to go around minefields not knowing that in Ukraine there was an an uninterrupted belt of Mines do you remember when some Classified German reports were leaked complaining that ukrainians did not know how to employ movement tactics these are all faces of the same medal NATO forces have a limited understanding of the conditions in Ukraine so NATO training and Equipment has shown its limitations in Ukraine could it be the same issue with the f-16s when the decision of providing F16 was originally taken the Ukrainian attitude was just teach us where the switches are and we're good to go it soon became clear that a more comprehensive approach was required while an expert pilot can learn how to safely fly the aircraft in few months if necessary actually qualifying to use the weapons and fly different types of missions with different tactics it is a long process that may take years and many Ukrainian Pilots assigned to the program were not even expert Pilots however it is very likely that Ukrainian Pilots are being taught to operate within a NATO environment characterized by the presence of NATO assets more over they are probably being taught Mission planning according to Nato style which is quite different from the ex Soviet style used in Ukraine the Russians have progressively moved away from the typical centralized style that they used to have but ukrainians were still a little behind the curve surely they have learned a lot of lessons during the war and some of them may fly in the face of what the pilots are being taught during the NATO training in particular if they're being told to be part of a typical NATO package which usually comes from very distant and safe bases it uses inflight refueling and it is designed to conduct well organized Time On Target operations against air defenses or ground targets well that is not what they're going to find in Ukraine they will have to conduct small isolated missions two or four ships at most against specific Targets on the line of contact trying to evade the Russian air defenses in case of air to air they may need to organize ambushes against the R combat a patrols that will likely still have a range and Technology Advantage smaller than before because the F-16 is surely a worse customer than the old Soviet aircraft but the Gap with the suit3 and the S35 is still there and if we consider the M31 well it is the M31 moreover they will have to scramble to try intercepting cruise missiles and drones probably with limited intelligence of where to find them a mission where Raider perform performance and quick execution are essential so I'm not saying this is the case this is speculative on my part but since this happened before I believe the doubt is legitimate so what do you think please let me know in the comments below so thank you very much for watching this video and an enormous thank you to all those who are already supporting the channel or Patron by being a member or buy one of donations you are absolutely essential to this operation and you will be even more essential in the next future considering what is to come and if you're not supporting the channel yet please if you can consider supporting the channel because the supporters have access to me but also have the possibility to see the sources that I'm using for the videos the additional material that I produce and sometimes there are just videos reserved for the supporters that show the backstage of this channel so thank you very very very very very much for watching and see you next time [Music]

Channel: Millennium 7 * HistoryTech

Views: 118,732

Keywords: Military, F-16, Ukraine

Id: ptk-NIv50fs

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2024