The F-16’s lack of stealth technology will light up Russian radar systems and make it vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive, launched in spring, is progressing slowly. Casualties on both sides are mounting, now estimated to be over a hundred thousand. Ukraine’s tanks and armored vehicles are getting picked off by missiles fired from Russian aircraft. Clearly, Ukraine needs to give its ground troops air support, right?
After resisting pleas from Ukraine for fighter jets for over a year, the U.S. has finally relented on Ukraine’s demands for attack aircraft. F-16s will be arriving by year’s end. Ukraine’s pilots will have undergone training in the fall.
The F-16s are expected to tip the balance of the war—toward Ukraine. But there is one reason they will not: radar.
The aging F-16 lights up Russian radar systems and is vulnerable to surface-to-air missile batteries. This will likely keep it from the front lines, where it could provide air support for ground forces.
The Balance of Air Power
Russia has 10 times more fighter aircraft than Ukraine (773 vs 69), 27 times as many dedicated attack aircraft (744 vs 28), and 16 times as many attack helicopters (537 vs 33), according to a tally kept by GlobalFirepower.com. Everyone thought they would be able to quickly gain air superiority over Ukraine, paving the way for an unimpeded invasion. But Ukraine, with radar and anti-aircraft weaponry, has kept Russian aircraft at bay, intercepting 90 percent of incoming threats, according to Greg Hayes, CEO of Raytheon, makers of the Patriot missile, quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
Russia, with its radar and S-400 air defense system, a bargain relative to the Patriot system, is nevertheless a formidable deterrent against anything Ukraine would try to fly against it. Ukrainian pilots are currently flying their Soviet-era MiG and Sukhoi fighter jets only close enough to targets that they can launch long-range missiles and then dart away before Russian radar can counter with anti-aircraft missiles, according to the New York Times. So effective have both sides become at keeping expensive aircraft out of the picture that the war continues to be a grind-it-out conflict with constant artillery and occasional missile strikes.
It may seem odd that a country that has historically not hesitated to men to their deaths in wars,[i] past and present, would be fearful of losing fighter jets—until you consider that these are modern fighter jets. Russia’s most advanced fighter, the Sukhoi Su-57, will cost 3.2 billion rubles (about $34 million) to produce. It would be most embarrassing to have it shot down by a Patriot missile.
Air Superiority Impossible?
Air superiority is chapter one in what has become the U.S. military playbook. U.S. forces quickly achieved air superiority in the Gulf Wars. This is an excerpt from a RAND report:[ii]
The opening shots in the war, 21 minutes prior to H-hour, were Hellfire missiles fired from Army Apache helicopters against Iraqi acquisition radars controlling four fighter bases. This cleared a penetration corridor enabling F-15s to fan out in search of Iraqi mobile surface-to-surface missiles. Twelve minutes later, a single F-117 (one of 12 in the initial attack) took out an interceptor operations center, proceeding thereafter to hit a second target in western Iraq 20 minutes later. These attacks helped blind Iraq’s air defenses and cripple key control nodes.
One might consider establishing air superiority over a desert kingdom like Iraq a far cry from achieving air superiority against Russia. But Iraq, coming off lengthy wars against neighboring Iran, had amassed one of the biggest militaries in the world. And by the January, 17, 1991, the day Operation Desert Storm commenced, it possessed one of the world’s most fearsome integrated air defense systems, assembled from French and Russian suppliers.
Russian radar is also quite advanced—and there is a lot of it. In Skunk Works, former director of Lockheed’s top secret research lab of the same name, Ben Rich, tells how Russian radar technology at the height of the Cold War was more advanced than what the U.S. possessed, and running the length of its borders, was able to unerringly detect incoming aircraft. The U.S. Air Force dreaded having to send in manned bombers (B-52s) with “radar signature as big as a barn”) or the F-111 (“radar signature as big as a Cape Cod with a car port”) should the order come to bomb Moscow. The “blue suiters” knew they’d have to send in many airplanes because all would be detected and many would be shot down. What was needed was aircraft that could not be detected.
In a top secret program, Lockheed had developed special coatings that could reduce radar signatures by as much as 35 percent, but research uncovered an obscure Russian research paper that noted how a flat shape at certain angles would reflect radar almost completely away so that no radiation was returned to the radar station. The researcher presented his calculations of an incredibly small radar signature to an incredulous Rich.
“How small. Like a Piper Cub?” Rich is said to have asked.
“Smaller,” said the researcher.
“As small as an eagle?”
“As small as an eagle’s eyeball!”
Lockheed ran computer simulations to optimize the shapes and ended up with the oddest-looking aircraft composed of a 3D patchwork of flat triangular shapes. That led to a full-scale wooden model, painted black, that was to be tested mounted on a stand in White Sands Missile Range, the site of the most sensitive radar this side of the Iron Curtain. The radar technician could not detect the model on the stand. It was not until a small bird landed on the model that the technician thought his equipment had righted itself and was able to detect what he thought was the model aircraft.
Proving that the stealth aircraft was one thing; flying it was another. The arrowhead shape was aerodynamically unstable and depended on a then-novel idea: control the surface by computer and electrical motors, dubbed “fly by wire.”
After successful test flights, the stealth aircraft designated the F-117, was kept secret.
“Our enemies can find out we have it when we use it against them,” was the official U.S. military position.
The world was not to find out about the F-117 until it was used in Operation Desert Storm, dropping the first bomb of the war, a laser-guided 500-pound GBU-27 exclusive to the stealth aircraft.
Ben Rich tells with pride how the stealth aircraft developed under his watch, with the radar signature of a ball bearing, were able to fly straight into Baghdad and in a surprise attack, bomb the Iraqi central air command facility, heavily defended as it was with radar and anti-aircraft batteries.
F-16s May Not Win the War but Could Keep Ukraine from Losing It
A pity the most advanced attack fighter we can give Ukraine is the F-16, an agile but aging fighter, with the radar signature of a sitting duck.
The F-16s, if not wasted on the front lines, could be used in an interceptor role, guarding Kiev and other cities against cruise missiles and incoming fighters and bombers, for example. Stationed and flying deep within Ukraine’s borders, they would be out of range of Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft missiles.
Reference
Ben Rich and Leo Janus, Skunk Works, A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, 1996.
[i] The Soviet Union had as many as 10.7 million military casualties in World War II, twice as many as Germany. By comparison, the Allies had far fewer (U.K.: 384,000 military casualties and the U.S: 417,000). Figures from the National War Museum.
[ii] Benjamin S. Lambeth, “The Winning of Air Supremacy in Operation Desert Storm,” , RAND Corporation, 1993.
