Comments made to reporters by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on May 25 suggested that the provision of F-16s to the Kiev regime will be miniscule, but at enormous cost. “The Russians have 1,000 fourth-generation fighters,” he said, following a virtual meeting of the multinational Ukraine Defense Contact Group. “If you’re going to contest Russia in the air, you’re going to need a substantial amount of fourth- and fifth-generation fighters, so if you look at the cost curve and do the analysis, the smartest thing to have done is exactly what we did do, which is provide a significant amount of integrated air defenses to cover the battlespace and deny the Russians the airspace.”
“If you look at the F-16, ten F-16s [cost] a billion dollars, the sustainment costs another billion dollars, so you’re talking about $2 billion for ten aircraft,” Milley said, adding that if the planes had been sent sooner, they would have eaten up the funding for other capabilities that have been provided. “There are no magic weapons in war, F-16s are not and neither is anything else,” he said.
