Fighter jets to Ukraine would take 18 months after Biden approval, Pentagon says
Mike Brest
Video Embed
If President Joe Biden decides to provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter aircraft, it would take roughly 18 months for them to reach the battlefield and the same amount of time to train their troops on them.
Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, described the timeline for training Ukrainians and transporting fighter aircraft to Ukraine to the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. The president reiterated his stance against sending the aircraft as recently as last week.
TIMELINE OF RUSSIA’S YEARLONG WAR IN UKRAINE
Members of both parties have urged Biden to change his mind, with some going as far as to suggest the U.S. military begin training Ukrainian troops on fighter aircraft now to cut down on time should the president ultimately decide to provide them.
“Our assessment is that a delivery timeline for F-16, even on the most expeditious timeline, and the training timelines, are essentially the same,” he told the committee. “That is, they’re about 18 months and so you don’t actually have time by starting the training early in our assessment. And since we haven’t made the decision to provide F-16s, and neither have our allies and partners, it doesn’t make sense to start to train them on a system they may never get.”
Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, reiterated the call for F-16s in a call with Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Monday.
Kahl acknowledged that it’s “a priority for” Ukraine but said, “It’s not one of their top three priorities,” adding, “Their top priorities are air defense systems that is keeping their intercepting network alive against Russian cruise missiles and Iranian drones, artillery and fires, which we’ve talked about, and armor and mechanized systems.”
Ukraine has requested as many as 128 fourth-generation aircraft, while DoD estimates they need between 50-80 of them to replace their existing air force. The expense would be enormous, roughly $10 billion if DoD provided new aircraft and still $2 billion to $3 billion if they provided half that number of old aircraft. These U.S. dollars would then not be spent on weapons that the U.S. could deliver much sooner.
“That would consume a huge portion of the remaining security assistance that we have for this fiscal year,” Kohl continued. “So these are the trade-offs that we are making in real-time when it makes sense to, you know, spend $3 billion on a capability that will arrive a year and a half from now.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Biden ruled out sending F-16s to Ukraine “for now” in an interview last week, insisting Ukraine’s military “doesn’t need F-16s now.”
He has changed his mind about providing certain weapon systems to Ukraine that he previously declined multiple times during the war, though there’s no public indication he will change his stance regarding F-16s.