A U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter takes off at Jagel Air Base in Jagel, Germany, June 23 PHOTO: DANIEL REINHARDT/DPA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. officials are whispering to the press that the Ukrainians aren’t performing up to snuff in Europe’s bloodiest fighting in decades. What an unseemly exercise: The Biden crowd withholds the heavy firepower the Ukrainians need to defeat a Russian invasion, and then laments that Kyiv isn’t retaking enough territory fast enough.
The Ukrainians are struggling to break through heavily fortified Russian defenses. “It’s not quite connected trench lines like World War I,” Gen. Mark Milley said on Tuesday, “but it’s not dissimilar from that, either—lots of complex minefields, dragon’s teeth, barbed wire, trenches.” Ukrainian equipment is getting chewed up by Russian mines, and Kyiv’s troops need more help to clear the explosives.
The offensive is still in early days, and Ukraine hasn’t committed most of its troops trained by the West. But U.S. officials are telling press outlets without attribution that the Ukrainians aren’t excelling at combined arms—that is, working tanks, infantry, air power and other assets in coordination.
But no Western military would execute this offensive without controlling the skies. Ukrainian troops are vulnerable to Russian attack, and they lack the air power to support ground troops and go on offense against Russian positions without risking awful losses.
F-16 fighters would be a big improvement. Russian surface-to-air missile sites “can be lucrative targets” for F-16 pilots, as retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright wrote in February. Long-range precision weapons could help “destroy Russian air defense systems near the borders, and kill Russian tanks, artillery, and dug-in positions in the Eastern part of Ukraine.”
Western allies are supposed to start training Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16 next month. But the truth is Ukraine could have had such pilots up and flying by now. The U.S. has known from the start that Ukraine’s Soviet-era jet fleet isn’t equipped to compete with Russia’s larger and more advanced force. The Ukrainians have nonetheless used U.S. anti-radiation missiles in ingenious ways, eluding Russian air defenses to achieve pockets of air superiority.
These pages suggested putting Ukrainian pilots in U.S. flight training programs in April 2022. Yet the Biden Administration hesitated about transferring even some rickety Polish MiG-29s. In February of this year, President Biden said Ukraine “doesn’t need” F-16s, only to decide three months later that the U.S. would support an allied effort to train Ukrainian pilots.
Alas, don’t assume the U.S. has the will to follow through on the jets. Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, reminded reporters on Tuesday that the jets are expensive. He said a large fleet would take years—“years to train the pilots, years to do the maintenance and sustainment, years to generate that financial degree of support to do that. You’re talking way more billions of dollars than has already been generated.”
Yet offering F-16s is far less expensive than a Ukrainian defeat that draws the U.S. deeper into Europe’s problems. The F-16 is in service in militaries across the world, with a broad base of contractors that can help set up maintenance support. As with every U.S. weapon donated to Ukraine—from tanks to Patriot air defenses to Himars artillery—the Biden Administration says the systems are too complicated to offer Kyiv until one day those problems are suddenly declared to be manageable.
The bill for this indecision is coming due, and the tragedy is more Ukrainian casualties and a more fraught counteroffensive. The dithering also erodes political support at home, as more Americans start to wonder what the U.S. is accomplishing. Mr. Biden can still decide that a long, ugly quagmire isn’t what the U.S. wants in Ukraine.
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