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The actual reason is that the air defense systems won’t really work well or efficiently for Ukraine. Air defense is uniquely viable in Israel because Israel is extremely small and quite rich, and so a density of systems is possible that wouldn’t even be viable somewhere like Germany or France, let alone a more sparsely populated Western country like the US, let alone a poor and sparsely populated country like Ukraine. Also, Russians aren’t firing homemade Hamas dumb rockets vaguely targeted toward Israel; defending against more modern missiles is harder and even in the recent attack a few Iranian missiles seem to have gotten through into Israel.
For Ukraine, while air defence against drones and cruise misiles is important, keeping Russian bombers away from the frontlines is absolutely crucial. It’s quite clear that Russia can’t mass produce the first in numbers big enough to really win the war. But they have a world class air force and basically infinite supply of bombs to be retrofitted as glide bombs if there is no concern for planes getting shut down.
If the Russian air force gets free rein over the frontline then the war is over. Due to a mix of inherited Soviet air defense (which was quite substantial as Soviet western armies had enormous stockpiles from what I understand), gifts systems from the west and manpads the Russian planes were essentially missing.
This is changing rapidly right now and there is big panic on the Ukrainian side. It should be visible to the leadership that the loss ratios are becoming untenable and the fortifications just can’t stand.
Itll be interesting to see if the f16s coming soon can change that.
I'll spoil the surprise: they can't. Too little, too late - and Ukraine cannot support or defend the infrastructure required to maintain them in the current state of the war.
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Here’s the problem with F-16s. They need a very long paved runway. The Soviet MiGs they had been using before are designed with filters over the engine intakes, so they can take off from improvised dirt or gravel runways. F-16s can’t do that, the runway has to be paved. That means you can’t move the F-16 squadrons around well or disperse forces, because the number of runways that can host them are very limited. So The two options are: 1. bunch them all up in a couple of runways and wait for them to get blown up with cruise missiles or 2. Base them out of Poland and risk making Poland a party to the conflict in a way that doesn’t easily allow them to claim article 5 if those runways are attacked. Which is why the US has been so hesitant to give them F16s in the first place.
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Certainly “interesting” (I just wish they stop fighting by then so we never have to find out..)
On the one hand, the naive voice in me says if it wasn’t going to be effective (and they didn’t have a good plan for it) then western governments would surely not waste such a valuable piece of tech. But lol.
On the other hand, the other naive voice says that since it has been announced she’s ago, Russians surely took necessary countermeasures. But again, lol.
F16 valuable tech? Its going to be European Block 15 MLU, worse even than 90s block 50s which were a last gasp of GodDamn before getting bought by LockMart.
The main benefit of the F16 isnt its high technology, better than a mig29 though it may be, but just how fucking many of them there are. NATO is hurting for artillery for Ukraine because the entire NATO conops is precision air dominance, making them stuffed to the gills with excess AIM 120 and AMRAAMS to go on the hundreds of airframes slated for the boneyards. I doubt the paltry number will make a difference for ground ops, but the A2 space will be much less free for Russians .
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