The smart way Ukraine is keeping its F-16s safe from Russia could be key to airpower survival in modern war

Business Insider

3 days ago

Being able to fight from non-traditional locations is a growing priority for the West amid concerns about peer-level conflict against a foe like Russia or China and the risk that fixed bases could be destroyed early in a conflict.
For Ukraine, dispersal and mobility, while maintaining agility, have been critical to the country's air forces surviving Russia's onslaught.
Ukraine is using two new truck-mounted complexes to support its US-made F-16 fighter jets with mission planning, maintenance, and munitions. These systems, developed and provided by the group Come Back Alive with support from Ukraine's military and energy sector, replace functions typically confined to fixed bases.
One of the new complexes has a command post and workstations for mission planning and briefings for pilots, as well as space for personnel to rest, and another comes with a workshop for testing and prepping weapons and trucks for putting munitions on the planes.
It's very important because " Ukrainian airfields are one of the enemy's priority targets, so it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep the aircraft safe," Come Back Alive said. Ukraine also has not been able to build the support infrastructure its F-16s need, so flexible solutions are required.
Tim Robinson, a military aviation specialist at the UK'S Royal Aeronautical Society, described it as a very innovative step that could be "critical" to helping Ukraine's few F-16s survive.
"You actually need to keep F-16s on the move, shift these vehicles around, and allow them to keep operating in these conditions where Russia is looking for them," Robinson said. With steps like this, he added, Ukraine is "getting to where a lot of NATO would like to be."
Ukraine's dispersal
Keeping aircraft dispersed and disaggregated has stopped Ukraine's air force, far smaller than Russia's, from being wiped out. A US general said Ukraine lost relatively few of its aircraft on the ground in the first 18 months because "they very seldom will take off and land at the same airfield."
Russia, on the other hand, didn't noticeably start trying to disperse its aircraft until Ukraine started hitting its bases with long-range drones, putting the war on Russian soil. And even though Russia now moves its aircraft to keep them safe, Ukraine continues to score hits on Russian aircraft due to the tendency to keep them clustered.
Ukraine has had more success in targeting Russian air bases than the Russians have hitting the Ukrainian ones.
Many Western nations depend heavily on permanent bases and fixed installations to support their aircraft fleet, which works well in peacetime or in conflict scenarios in which the opposing force lacks the means to reach them, as has been the case in Middle East conflicts over the past few decades. But countries with far more advanced arsenals and the capacity to eliminate enemy airpower on the ground make it necessary to have alternatives.
A sense of urgency in the West
The West has been leaning into dispersal, disaggregation, and fighting from austere locations amid concerns over both Russia and China. China's military has a growing reach, making US bases across the Pacific more vulnerable, and Russia is also on a war footing, increasing its missile output.
Amid efforts to boost air defenses, others are aimed at ensuring essential allied airpower isn't a sitting duck.
This is a driving force, for instance, behind what the US Air Force calls its Agile Combat Employment strategy, which involves operating from dispersed locations and keeping airpower agile and flexible. It considers this practice critical in the Pacific as China's military expands.
The US and allies want less reliance on traditional runways because it is much harder to target every piece of concrete in a country than it is to prosecute air bases.
Some fighter aircraft, like Sweden's Gripen, are built for rugged operations, and aircraft like MQ-9 Reaper drones and A-10 Warthogs have taken off and landed on dirt airstrips. Other jets like F-16s and newer F-35s have executed highway landings alongside other planes, and big C-130 transport aircraft have even landed on beaches.
The urgency has been ramped up as militaries closely watch Russia's war to see how it is fighting and to see what sort of changes they may need to make.
Robinsons said many Western militaries were already looking at dispersal, but "Ukraine has just kind of accelerated that, fast-tracked it, and put it back into people's minds."
A French lieutenant colonel, for instance, said that a 2023 dispersal exercise conducted involving British, American, and French air forces was "the new way of doing it, in order to face the peer threats that we are having at the moment."
The US has also noted the change. Gen. Kevin Schneider, Commander of US Pacific Air Forces, said in March that "the days of operating from secure, fixed bases are over," saying that the threats in the Indo-Pacific region require "a flexible, resilient force that can operate from multiple, dispersed locations under contested conditions."
Jarmo Lindberg, a former Finnish fighter pilot who served as commander of the Finnish Defense Forces, told Business Insider last year that front-line NATO countries should adopt more dispersal tactics.
He said Finland, which borders Russia and designed its military with a Russian threat in mind, has embraced the idea of dispersal for decades, including by having road bases and jets that can use civilian airfields, not just military ones.
Big changes, though, are hard, hugely expensive, and can make air operations less efficient.
A former Western air force intelligence officer, who spoke to BI on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak about what he learned in the role, said it's "a cultural thing that most Western air forces are used to operating from centralized bases."
But he said there needs to be some change away from full centralization, as "lining them all up to get whacked is not really an option."
A different sort of war
Ukraine's fight against Russia isn't necessarily what a peer-level conflict involving the West would look like. The West has far larger air forces and more advanced jets than Ukraine's. Kyiv, meanwhile, has Soviet-era jets and only a handful of used F-16s and Mirages.
There are still important lessons in this war, though.
Warnings that the West may not be ready for a major war with a near-peer adversary are now sparking major defense spending, and the air war is front of mind. Watching Ukraine, there's a growing realization, for example, that there is a huge shortage of ground-based air defenses in the West. These are vital systems for protecting bases and other targets.
Taras Chmut, the director of Come Back Alive, highlighted how different this fight is for Ukraine compared to how the jets were used by Western partners.
"The aircraft received by Ukraine appeared and existed in a closed ecosystem," he said. "They were not used the way we use them. Ours operate under the conditions of a full-scale war — with constant sorties and continuous Russian hunting for the aircraft."
He suggested the West wouldn't need to copy this exact solution. Ukraine doesn't have time "for the full deployment of infrastructure for the F-16; the most rational solution is to invest in a mobile ecosystem."
Developments in Ukraine are driven by immediate necessity, but the West is paying attention.
"Turning F-16 style, permanent base ops into Gripen-style dispersed operations is something that I think a lot of air forces will be looking at with interest," Robinson said.