Air Force Gen. James Hecker, the commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe-Africa, said yesterday that the F-16s being delivered to Ukraine will allow Ukrainian forces to better use munitions that have already been provided to them. The U.S. and NATO have provided AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM), AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range (JDAM-ER) and Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) precision-guided glide bombs both in ground launched versions and for use from Ukrainian MiG-29s and Su-27s, but they will work much better on the F-16 because it already has the NATO standard data connections that those weapons were designed to work with. “Now they’re going to have the opportunity to actually drop them off of an airplane that they were designed to come off of, which will give them more capability to change the targets in flight and things like that, that they’re not able to do with their other aircraft,” Hecker said, reported The War Zone.
Hecker also hyped the fact that the Ukrainians are getting NATO standard training in what the military calls tactics, techniques and procedures, or TTPs, so that they can fight just like NATO does.
