Sweden 🇸🇪 will send two Saab 340 AEW&C (ASC-890) Airborne Early Warning and Control Aircraft to Ukraine 🇺🇦 which have Link 16 and can communicate with F-16s, states the Swedish Ministry of Defense
https://x.com/ukraine_map/status/1795717885178126517?s=19
by Necessary-Canary3367
4 comments
Moscows AWACS keep getting knocked out of the sky. Now Ukraine will have their own.
They are also sending a bunch of AMRAAMs for the F-16’s.
Interesting…
NATO AWACS are almost constantly flying in the region, undoubtedly passing along intelligence to Ukraine, but (presumably) not actually coordinating airpower missions.
Flying these in the conflict zone is a big risk, since they’re fairly big and slow targets that light up their position with their EM signature, and are thus easy kills for SAMs–just ask Russia.
It makes me wonder if part of the delay in getting f-16s is not just the pilot training and maintainer training, but training professionals across the entirety of the NATO airpower ecosystem. To get the most bang for their buck, they really need to be operating at NATO standard, which means real time coordination by an Air Battle Manager. If ukriane is going to take the risk of actually operating these themselves, it makes me think that they have been training the ABMs over the last year or so, and that they actually may be able to employ the F-16 to its greatest capabilities. Good for them!
Nice