Ukraine will be getting old F-16s in the coming months, but their effectiveness in the air-to-air role will be highly dubious.
Apart from the fact that F-16s will be vulnerable on the ground, the F-16s that Ukraine will be getting are old F-16AM and F-16BM aircraft that have undergone the Mid-Life Upgrade (MLU), which roughly puts them on a par with Block 50/52 F-16s. So not the most modern F-16 variants.
These old F-16s that Ukraine will be given have old radars, they won’t have the latest AIM-120D air-to-air missiles (and even if they did, the old radars woudn’t be able to make the most of them anyway), and they won’t have electronic warfare pods or BriteCloud decoys to make them more effective and survivable.
So why exactly does Ukraine want these old F-16s? It doesn’t make much sense.
Gripens on the other hand are designed to operate from roads and they can be refuelled and rearmed in 10-20 minutes with a small ground crew of just half a dozen people, only one of whom needs to be an expert, the rest could be conscripts.
The Gripen also carries the Meteor air-to-air missile, which is far superior to the AIM-120 that the F-16 carries. The Gripen also carries the IRIS-T air-to-air missile, which is far superior to AIM-9X, and also has the ability to shoot down SAMs and air-to-air missiles. And the Gripen carries BriteCloud decoys to decoy radar-guided SAMs and air-to-air missiles. Fit a Gripen C with the Arexis EW pod and it will be even more survivable and harder to shoot down.
It seems that Ukraine will be getting about 60 F-16s in total, but not all at once. F-16s would be useful in the air-to-ground role if equipped with JASSM and PJDAM (Powered JDAM), but that’s a big ‘if’. But for the air-to-air role, these old F-16s seem pointless to me unless heavily upgraded.
6-12 Gripens would be far more useful to Ukraine in the air-to-air role than even 60 (unupgraded) F-16s.