You misunderstood something critical to the discussion.
US-made F-16s flown by USAF already have all that anti-Russian programming as you suggest. The F-16s built in the USA for the NATO countries often have country-specific hardware installed. That’s often done in factories in their country, not the USA. That creates high tech jobs in those countries and helps keep their own aviation industry alive. And helps insulate their politicians from charges that they are selling out the e.g. Dutch or Danish taxpayers by buying foreign-made US airplanes.
The Ukrainians are not receiving former USAF airplanes. They are getting former NATO airplanes. They have non-US EW systems that the USAF intel / EW people have never seen. EW being a bit of a black art and very secret, it’s entirely possible that under e.g. Danish classification systems, no foreigner (to them) may have access to any hardware box, software, or knowledge about any of that stuff. And from Denmark’s POV, USAF is a foreign military. An ally, but still foreign.
So a lot of bureaucratic hoops had to be jumped through to let USAF first learn about, then modify the e.g. Danish systems using US intel to perform better against whatever the Russians have deployed there.
On the US side there was a similar decision flail about deciding how much hard-won intel knowledge to pass along to the Danish and also the Ukrainians, knowing that the closer that hardware and software get to Russia, the more likely a Russian agent will get their hands on it.
There is always a delicate dance when allies get together about how much to share with the other guys. Some sharing is good, but you guard “the keys to the kingdom” very closely and share those with nobody.
There are probably also some technologies that only a short list of nations have, including the US and Russia (not deliberately shared, of course, but semi-independently developed or stolen). We might not ordinarily share countermeasures to those techs with allies, because we don’t want to compromise our own advantage with them. But in this case, we do want to share those countermeasures with Ukraine, because we know for sure they’ll be going up against the Russian version of those technologies.
That’s what I’ve been wondering, too. America is the largest F-16 user in the world, whatever tech is on those Vipers certainly can’t be too sensitive compared to the significantly more advanced F-35s that are already coming, and most of America’s Vipers are well on their way to being replaced by F-35s anyway.
A year or two ago, if told that 91 Vipers were scheduled to be delivered to Ukraine, one would certailny not guess that not a single one would be American.
a good strategy could have been: If you, RU use Iranian missiles on UKR targets, we (the USofA) will stop blocking the use of our weapons within pre-2014-RU territory.
Not really “the regional situation” but I don’t think it belongs in the “breaking news” thread either: they’ve apparently settled on the nickname “dracarys” for the thermite-dropping drone attacks. In seeing clips of the weapon in use, I knew it reminded me of something but I couldn’t quite recall what it was until I saw it being called that. I wonder if GRRM could be persuaded to go along with it like Stephen King gave the okay to call Covid “Captain Trumps”.
It was noted in the breaking news thread that Ukraine now has permission to fire ATACMS missiles into Russia and I just have to take a moment to note what a dumb name ATACMS is. What’s next, a radar-seeking missile called RECT-M followed by high explosive incendiary missiles called FKN-KLLDMS?
I was going to say it would be a cherry on top if Lysakovsky got taken out by a Ukrainian drone strike but after reading the article I am wondering if instead he was taken out by a Russian drone strike.
Putin has just announced an intent to increase the active duty headcount of the armed forces by roughly 12%. One wonders where he will find that many people.
A vintage power plant in shipping containers sounds interesting. I assume it won’t be assembled until after the war? A construction site now would attract drone strikes.
