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Chapter 89: "Give Us Wings": The Agonizing Saga of the F-16s

He flew his MiG-29 low and fast, a ghost hugging the contours of the ravaged earth, the treetops a blur of green and gray just meters below his canopy. "Juice" was one of the best, a veteran pilot of the Ukrainian Air Force with the callsign to prove his alcohol-free lifestyle, but every mission was a dance with suicide. He was hunting, but mostly, he was the hunted. His radar warning receiver, an old piece of Soviet tech with a tinny, screeching alarm he heard even in his sleep, screamed a constant, nerve-shredding tone. It was the electronic signature of a Russian Su-35 Flanker-E, a predator he could not see, somewhere in the high, clear blue above him, a different and more lethal species of aircraft altogether.

The Russian pilot had him "painted," locked on with a radar-guided R-37M missile fired from over one hundred kilometers away—an impossible distance, a different technological universe from the 1980s-era jet Juice was flying. The Su-35’s radar was a powerful eye that could see everything for hundreds of kilometers. Juice’s was a weak flashlight that barely reached past the horizon. The Russian pilot could fire his missile and immediately turn away, a "fire-and-forget" shot from the safety of his own airspace, a technological sanctuary. For Juice to even attempt a shot with his own outdated R-27 missiles, he would have had to fly directly at the enemy jet, keeping his nose locked on to "illuminate" the target for the missile to follow, an act that was now simply a death sentence. It was a duel between a sniper and a man with a knife.

All he could do was what he always did: break off the attack, pop flares hoping to fool the missile’s seeker, and dive for the relative safety of the weeds, yanking the jet into a gut-wrenching turn that pushed its aging airframe to its limits. He wasn't truly fighting; he was merely surviving, a testament to raw skill and courage in the face of an invisible, technologically superior god who owned the sky. He would return to base, drenched in a cold sweat, having achieved nothing but his own survival for one more day.

Later, on the ground, a different, more exhausting battle began. In a dusty, makeshift press room at his airbase, surrounded by the sandbags that were a constant reminder of the threat of ballistic missiles, Juice gave another interview. His English, learned from TV and practice, was flawless, his arguments chillingly precise. He was no longer just a fighter pilot; he had been forced to become his country's most eloquent and desperate advocate. He explained the brutal physics of the new front line to yet another Western journalist. The Russians, he said, adapting to their losses, were no longer risking their expensive jets in Ukrainian airspace. They were standing off, fifty kilometers from the front, in their sanctuary, and launching devastating, GPS-guided "glide bombs."

"They are one-and-a-half-ton bombs," he explained, his hands gesturing to show the scale, his voice edged with a fatigue that went far beyond a lack of sleep. "They fall on our boys' heads in Avdiivka, ten, twenty, fifty at a time. They vaporize bunkers that can withstand artillery. And in our MiGs, with our old missiles, we cannot get close enough to stop the jets that drop them. We are watching a slaughter we are powerless to prevent. We need the F-16s. This is not about a glorious 'offensive.' This is about survival. It is about having a fair fight. Just give us the wings to defend our own sky."

He knew the jets had finally been promised, a subject of endless, agonizing debate in the corridors of power in Washington and Brussels. But the promise was a distant mirage. The decision to begin training the pilots had also been delayed for a year by the same fears of escalation, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of unreadiness. Now, the training was agonizingly slow, the delivery dates kept slipping, and the political will seemed to ebb and flow with every headline. Every day he waited, every week that passed, he knew, was a week the glide bombs fell, a week his brothers on the ground were being pulverized by a threat he could see but could not touch. For a man born to fight in the air, this helplessness was more terrifying than any dogfight.

The Discourse 89: The Doctrine of the Sanctuary

89.1 The Self-Imposed Red Line and the Fallacy of Training

Of all the delays in providing critical weapon systems to Ukraine, the most agonizing and strategically consequential was the saga of the F-16 fighter jet. For more than a year, the United States and its key allies created and then clung to a self-imposed "red line," explicitly refusing to provide Ukraine with modern Western combat aircraft. The publicly stated reason was a persistent and debilitating fear of "escalation"—the idea that providing this specific capability would cross an invisible line and provoke an unpredictable Russian response. See [citation 1]. A secondary, often-cited excuse was the supposedly prohibitive timeline for training pilots and ground crews. However, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy; the political decision to even begin the training was itself delayed for nearly a year by the same fears of escalation, deliberately postponing the start of a process that was then criticized for its length. This fear, which expert analysis demonstrated was misplaced, transformed the F-16 from a piece of military hardware into a potent political symbol of Western self-deterrence.

89.2 A Ceded Sky and the Physics of a Slaughter

This political decision had catastrophic and entirely predictable consequences on the battlefield. By refusing to provide Ukraine with the means to contest control of the air, the West effectively ceded the skies over the front lines to the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS), granting them a sanctuary from which to operate with impunity. This created the perfect environment for Russia to perfect and mass-deploy its most devastating tactical weapon of the war: the UMPK guided "glide bomb." These are crude but brutally effective weapons—cheap, Soviet-era dumb bombs retrofitted with a simple pop-out wing and GPS guidance kit. Launched from Russian jets flying safely within their own airspace, fifty to seventy kilometers from their targets, these massive bombs could glide to their destination with devastating power, far beyond the reach of most of Ukraine's overstretched ground-based air defenses. See [citation 2].

The technological disparity was a matter of simple physics. A Russian Su-35, equipped with long-range R-37M missiles, could detect and shoot down a Ukrainian MiG-29 from over 150 kilometers away. The Ukrainian pilot, with outdated Soviet missiles, would have to get within 50 kilometers to even attempt a shot, a suicidal prospect. As detailed by airpower analysts long before the political decision was made, the F-16, equipped with modern radars and AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, was the only viable antidote—a tool that could challenge the Russian jets in their sanctuary and force the glide bombers back from the front. See [citation 4].

89.3 The Battle of Avdiivka: A Case Study in Tactical Adaptation

The Ukrainian withdrawal from the fortress city of Avdiivka in February 2024 was the first major strategic defeat directly attributable to this ceded air superiority. The campaign demonstrated a lethal Russian tactical adaptation. Unable to achieve deep air superiority due to mobile Ukrainian air defenses, the VKS instead focused on achieving localized, temporary air dominance directly over the front line using glide bombs launched from a safe standoff distance. In the final weeks of the battle, Russian forces were dropping sixty to eighty glide bombs per day on the Ukrainian positions. This was not random bombing; it was a systematic campaign of attrition against prepared defenses, methodically destroying bunkers and supply lines in a way that ground forces alone could not. See [citation 3]. The loss of Avdiivka was not a failure of the Ukrainian soldier on the ground; it was a victory won by a Russian adaptation that was only possible because its launch platforms were protected by the West's political decisions. See [citation 5].

89.4 A Cascade of Doctrinal Failures

The failure to provide airpower was not a standalone mistake; it had a cascading effect that doomed other aspects of the war effort. The 2023 summer counteroffensive was, in effect, a request for the Ukrainian army to execute the NATO doctrine of combined-arms maneuver warfare (Bewegungskrieg), a military philosophy centered on speed, surprise, and aggression. However, as military theorists have chronicled, the single most critical enabler of this doctrine since 1939 is air superiority. See [citation 6]. Without control of the air, armored columns are rendered horribly vulnerable. By denying Ukraine F-16s, the West asked the Ukrainian army to fight a modern war with one arm tied behind its back. They were asked to breach the Surovikin Line while their armored columns were mercilessly hunted by Russian Ka-52 helicopters, which F-16s could have challenged. They lacked the primary tool for the Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD)—a core role of the F-16—meaning Russian anti-aircraft systems could operate freely, savaging the few Ukrainian aircraft that tried to support their troops. As Ukrainian pilots like the late Andrii "Juice" Pilshchykov repeatedly argued, the F-16s were not simply about offense; they were about creating a protective umbrella under which the ground forces could survive and maneuver. See [citation 7]. The saga of the F-16s thus represents the tragic culmination of the West's policy of "delayed steel," a policy that doctrinally predestined the counteroffensive to failure.