Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, visited Ukraine on Tuesday and said he sensed a shift in Washington that could lead to arming Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets and longer-range missiles.
According to Reuters, McCaul said the Biden administration was still split on “how fast and what weapons” to send to Ukraine. “But I’m seeing increasing momentum towards getting the artillery and the planes in,” he told reporters in Kyiv. “And in any event, we can start training the pilots right now, so they’re ready.”
Ukraine has been seeking the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), missiles that can be fired from the HIMARS rocket systems and have a range of up to 190 miles. The current munitions Ukraine is using can hit targets 50 miles away. The US recently announced it will send Ukraine Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB), which have a range of about 94 miles, but they could take months or years to be delivered.
McCaul visited Kyiv just one day after President Biden was in the city. McCaul told Fox News that the president’s visit wasn’t enough to support the Ukrainians. “It’s good President Biden visited Ukraine, but a photo op isn’t enough. He needs to get Ukraine the weapons they need to win now, especially ATACMS,” he said.
McCaul wants the US to give Ukraine the ability to strike targets in Crimea, operations that would risk a significant escalation of the war, as even Secretary of State Antony Blinken recognized the peninsula is a “red line” for Moscow. Despite the risk of escalation, Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, said last week that the US supports Ukrainian attacks on Crimea.
Sending longer-range weapons risks a significant escalation even if they’re not used to hit Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech on Tuesday that the “longer the range of the Western systems being brought to Ukraine, the farther away from our borders we will be forced to push the threat.”
Great, now there’s growing incentives for terrible politicians to prove they are “tough” by crossing red lines. We are so dead.
Good one, Zombie Messiah! “We are so dead,” is more job security for you? LOL. Love your pen name by the way. I’m jealous.
Yeah, now is the time of my ministry – shuffling, unhappy, unthinking, always consuming unto the end.
How do you boil a frog? turn up the heat slowly but steadily…. somehow this fits all of us in the US as well as those actual humans on the ground in Ukraine, and Russia as the designated Enemy of All. I mean our gooses (geese? frogs?) are all getting the living daylights cooked out of them.
“In Kyiv, Rep. McCaul Says Ukraine More Likely to Get ATACMS, F-16s ATACMS are missiles with a range of up to 190 miles”
Blowback “the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation.”
ATACMS with a range of 190 miles means Russia will take an additional 190 miles of Ukraine from central Ukraine.
F-16s means that Russia will put more Surface to Air Missiles SAMs in Ukraine and refine the systems they manufacture to make them more effective.
I strongly suspect that the talk about F-16s is just bluff. Because they would be the most high profile weapons sent so far, and would have a very short life expectancy whenever they were used in the battle. Does NATO want to be humiliated like that?
I’m no expert but don’t F-16 need trained pilots who operate that type of plane?
It needs trained pilots who spend a little time familiarizing themselves with the difference between that type of plane and other types of planes.
I’ve heard that for pilots that had previously flown the mig fighters it would take months if not years to transition to an F-16.
Maybe, but it seems unlikely. It might, depending on the individual pilot, take months to get as good at advance combat aerobatics in a different plane, but the fundamentals of fixed-wing flight don’t change just because you slap a different label on the airframe.
The person I heard it from (can’t remember who) said that it had to do with muscle memory which is vastly different on the two aircrafts. They claimed that it might be near impossible, or at least very dangerous, to make the transition and put a pilot in a combat situation.
Yes, muscle memory is important for e.g. high-speed, no time to think about it maneuver.
And it does take time to develop, as anyone who’s ever switched cars, motorcycles, etc. can tell you (the consequences of slower reaction time are more dire when you’re moving at mach 1.5 than when you’re moving at 30 mph, of course).
How much time presumably varies from pilot to pilot. But there are changeovers all the time. My late brother was in aviation ordnance for the Marine Corps. My recollection is that when the squadron he was with at the time switched from F-4 Phantoms to FA-18 Hornets, it was a multi-month process for the squadron as a whole, not just because pilots had to get used to the new aircraft, but because mechanics, ordnance crews, etc. had to adjust to the differences as well.
When it comes to planes, I have two big questions:
1) How useful are they? IMO, we’re seeing the very tail end of manned fixed-wing aircraft. Air defenses are becoming too effective, and unmanned drones are becoming too cheap. Why put $30 million into an airplane and months or years into training a pilot, just to lose the plane and pilot … when for the same aircraft cost and the time it takes to copy the latest improved piloting program onto a drive, you can put up a multi-drone swarm, at least one of which might get past the air defenses and hit a target?
2) How much longer is the war going to last? The timeline for getting new planes / retrained pilots into action may be shorter or it may be longer. Unless the war is expected to continue in very hot mode for at least another year, it may be a waste of resources.
Any war is a waste of resources.