Ukraine May Use F-16s as Kamikazes to Rev Up Rockets But Russia Has Means to Counter Threat
© AFP 2023 / MADS CLAUS RASMUSSEN
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President Putin has reiterated that F-16s in Ukraine “will not change the situation on the battlefield,” and warned that the launch of the planes from third countries would make the latter legitimate targets for Russia. Sputnik asked one of Russia’s top military aviation experts about the tools Moscow has at its disposal to counter the US jets.
Russia will destroy F-16s “just as we today destroy tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, including multiple rocket launchers,” Vladimir Putin told Russian military pilots during a working trip to Tver region Wednesday night.
Pointing to the F-16s’ ability to carry nuclear weapons, Putin warned that Russia “must take this into account while planning” combat operations.
Ukraine expects to get the first half-dozen or so of its 45 or more pledged F-16s in July, with deliveries delayed by overruns in pilot training time and difficulties finding suitable bases for them (which Russia has already begun preemptively bombing).
Military observers have warned repeatedly about the perils Ukrainian pilots flying F-16s will face operating the aircraft against Russia, with many pointing out that unlike some of newer weapons sent to Kiev which have been developed in recent decades – like drones and precision rocket artillery, the F-16 is a technological relic which Moscow has had the means to destroy going back to the 1970s. In other words, the 4th gen-multirole fighter may be suitable for bombing developing countries without an air force into the stone age, but are completely inappropriate to target a peer competitor of the United States and NATO.
Nikolai Bodrikhin, one of Russia’s top military aviation historians and authors, agrees with Putin’s assessment of the fate F-16s can expect if and when they arrive in Ukraine.
“I agree that they are unlikely to change anything, since the plane is quite old, to say the least,” Bodrikhin told Sputnik. “The aircraft is well known to us. The means of electronic warfare it uses are known. We have an array of weapons against it, both air-to-air and surface-to-air.”
The former include everything from the R-73 and R-77 short-range air-to-air missiles (range 40-160 km), to the medium-range R-27 (operational range up to 170 km), the long-range R-33 (the latest variants of which can fly up to 304 km) and the ultra-long-range hypersonic beyond-visual-range R-37 missile (operational range 150-400 km, maximum speed Mach 6).
A Russian Su-35S fighter jet fires what appears to be an R-37M ultra-long-range air-to-air missile in a promotional video by the Russian Ministry of Defense
Russian ground-based defenses include everything from the 9K333 Verba man-portable infrared homing SAM (4.5 km maximum range), to the 9M337 Sosna-R laser-guided supersonic two-stage missile (10 km max range), the Pantsir SAM system (20 km firing range using Hermes-K and 57E6 missiles), the 2K12 Kub mobile missile system (range up to 25 km), and the S-200, S-300, S-350, S-400 and S-500 missile systems – each of which can launch their missiles distances between 200 and 600 km from the target – beyond the range of any available weapon in the F-16 pantheon.
“Our fighters have missiles with a range that’s probably no less than that of the F-16’s air-to-air missiles, and there are ground-based complexes, even the old S-200 complexes, which can hit them quite easily – all the more so when it comes to the more modern S-300, S-400 and others, like the various Buks,” Bodrikhin said. “In other words, we have a lot of air defense systems capable of destroying a significant number of these aircraft, even if they attack simultaneously.”
Russia's S-300 missile system is seen working in the Kharkov area of the front. File photo.
© Sputnik
/ Accordingly, the observer said, the only practical threat the US-made aircraft can pose to Russia are as a missile carrier on a suicide mission.
“I don’t expect these planes to play any major role, but they can carry and accelerate air-to-ground missiles like a kamikaze – speeding the missile up and getting shot down, but the missile will be become difficult to intercept. This is the only regard in which a danger can manifest itself,” Bodrikihin said.
To counter this threat, Russia’s Air Force and Air Defense Troops will have to track the F-16 jets from the moment of launch, and when they gain an appropriate height (conventionally, above 3,000 meters), they must be attacked and destroyed, according to the observer.
As for concerns expressed by Putin and earlier by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the F-16s have the capacity to carry nuclear weapons, Bodrikihin said that that’s indeed the case, but that he hopes Kiev and its Western patrons “are smart enough not to use them,” because otherwise the Ukrainian crisis would immediately escalate into a direct Russia-NATO conflict and prompt Moscow to react accordingly.
While some Western officials and media have touted the F-16 as a potential “game changer” for Ukraine on the front lines, others have been more reserved, with the Rand Corporation, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank, warning last May that Russian jets’ advanced radars and missiles with “a much longer range” than their NATO-supplied counterparts may make Ukraine’s F-16s sitting ducks. “In other words, Russian aircraft can potentially spot Ukrainian F-16s and shoot them down before the Ukrainian pilots see them coming. This is exactly what has been happening with Ukraine’s current fleet of Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters, and the improved capabilities of the F-16 are not enough to tilt this disparity in Ukraine’s favor,” the report said.
