Russia and Ukraine

[Thumpalumpacus]

The problem is dust: Soviet Mig fighter jet do not require extremely clean and well maintained airbases. F-16’s do. + it’s a huge task to train Ukrainian pilot on these western made fighter jets.

I worked at a USAF base which housed a squadron of 24 F-16s. They're no more nor less vulnerable to typical conditions at a paved airbase, and in wartime from bare-base, "unclean" areas, they did pretty well in Saudi Arabia, whose bases, I can again tell you from personal experience aren't terribly dust- or sand-free.

Of paved airbases, Ukraine has 35 airfields with concrete runways extending over 2000 meters in length.

The holdup is training. At the base I mentioned above, when the 31st TFW converted to F-16s from F-4Es, it took them ten months -- and they were American pilots, familiar with American instrumentation, fluent in English (gotta read those manuals!), accustomed to American (as opposed to metric) measurements, and so on.

They also seem to forget that the Russians are expected to have already shot off the vast majority of their precision-munitions park at civilians -- even though the Ukrainian Air Force is still flying.