Gamechanger? How F-16s for Ukraine Will Shake-Up Russia’s Plans

Gamechanger? How F-16s for Ukraine Will Shake-Up Russia’s Plans

[Music] Ryan it’s great to see you today thank you so much for inviting me it’s great to be here so Ryan you’re a well-known ENT analyst and you’ve done a lot of stuff but you’re watching what’s going on now in Ukraine some people are saying that soon Ukraine will be receiving some f-16s what do you think about that is is that really a game changer or is it just hype you know everything has been a game changer but if you if you put enough game changers in one place you might actually be able to change the game uh Belgium is donating 30 f16s the Netherlands is donating 42 f-16s Denmark 19 so now you’ve got over 80 f-16s uh there that’s enough for six squadrons the Squadron is roughly 12 planes could be more could be less and uh and a training Squadron and Ukraine might actually keep some of those squadrons outside of Ukraine or they may FL buy them back to the West uh for those planes to be maintained it’s a really big deal because the capability the F-16 brings and and the kind of F-16 we’re talking about here it’s kind of roughly equivalent to like a golf War era block 50 uh block 52 F16 uh which means we’re talking about aapg 66 upgraded radar uh we’re talking about early warning receivers we’re talking about being able to use targeting pods and and what this gives Ukraine is a capability beyond what it has now in four essential areas the first is airto a and in that case right now Russia has the advantage when it comes to air-to-air missiles they have a missile called the r37 has a range of roughly 120 miles uh some say up to like 400 or so kilometers although I I don’t think that’s really possible but essentially Russia fly uh Mig 31s and right outside of Ukraine’s airspace and they just kind of wait for Ukrainian fighters to pop up they see them they shoot and since Ukrainian MC 29s 227s they don’t really have the kind of early warning radar that most modern planes have Ukraine relies on ground radar or radar that’s based on the ground to detect these incoming missiles and then it has to tell these Planes hey go home someone just fired a missile at you that’s a huge problem now by using America’s long range missiles like the a120 amam which have a range of it depends on the variant we’re talking 60 miles 80 miles by using that it doesn’t quite get to parody As the Russian r37 but it gets close and it’s it should be enough to force Russia to move back because they don’t want to lose any more Fighters they don’t want to start tangling with Ukraine so step one phase one using the F-16 is to establish error dominance with the amram missile step two is to start using the harm anti-radiation missile or essentially an anti- radar missile this missile kind of goes and sniffs out radar the way a pig sniffs out truffles now right now the mig29 is equipped with the harm anti-radiation missile but it has to be pre-programmed on the ground the F-16 is designed to be able to uh detect radar and once it detects that radar tell the har missile hey go shoot down the beam of that radar so it can do it on the Fly literally on the Fly you can go and Hunt radar like this so you’ll have an F-16 is kind of like a bait plane the radar will light up that bait plane the F-16 will turn launch the radar or launch the missile right down that radar beam turn away and that is really difficult because now Russia would should be scared to turn on their radar because they don’t know what’s going to happen when they turn on that radar they might get a missile right down that beam phase three is the jam ER or joint direct attack munition extended range this is a GPS guided Glide bomb now I know that Russia has been degrading GPS capabilities but how do you degrade GPS capabilities well you do that with a GPS Jammer what does a GPS Jammer do well it transmits and if something is transmitting what can you do you can home in on Jam so with harm anti-radiation missiles and with Jam once they turn those Jammers on we can go oh there’s the source of the Jammer fire a missile right down that Jammer beam and that should free up the electro magnetic Spectrum in order to use the Jan ER Precision Glide bombs to destroy Russian troop con concentrations to destroy Russian logistic sites and to destroy um any uh any sites at the front if they’re trying to perform an attack or a breakthrough and the fourth thing is the harm an or and the fourth thing is the uh Harpoon anti- ship missile now Russia is still using ships Platforms in the Black Sea to launch cruise missiles against cities inside of Ukraine so if you take out these ships that’s one less platform Russia can use as a cruise missile launching device so the F-16 is really a quadruple effect weapon system and that’s kind of where the whole game changer thing falls into place so it’s a very convincing argument very good sales tactic of why we should be buying f-16s or giving them to Ukraine in this case but a lot of people say that it’s unrealistic I mean the f-16s takes a lot of training not just for the pilots but for the mechanics takes a lot of spare parts uh and obviously if they were stored within Ukraine uh we could expect that the Russians would try to strike them what would you say to those naysayers uh machines are going to get destroyed in war that’s just that’s just War and the F-16 is not invulnerable now the argument to destroying f-16s on the ground while they’re at airfields that is certainly possible but Russia hasn’t really done that to start attacking airfields is really dangerous business and that would mean Russia would have to launch an operation where they penetrate Ukrainian airspace and they try to fight their way towards these air bases and so far other than at the beginning of the war they really haven’t done that they’ve mainly hung outside the periphery of Ukraine and done things like launch cruise missiles launch Glide bombs so Russia might certainly be able to strike at some of these airfields but they’re going to have to do it while fighting their way through Ukraine’s own surfaced air missiles and Ukraine’s scrambled Fighters and that just might be a cost decision that Russia is going to have to weigh uh if you send a strike package of 18 fighters to attack one air base but you lose nine of those Fighters trying to attack one air base and destroy a couple of Fighters on the ground what have you won all right so that’s always a calculation you’re going to do uh there is is not going to be any kind of attack without some sort of loss on the Russian side so really the calculus is how much is it worth to attack these f16s so let’s talk about a totally different aspect of the war A lot’s been going on with drones as you know and a lot of people said that this war has totally revolutionized the way that drones are used in Warfare what do you think about that how do you see the situation with drones that’s an excellent question I think drones are having their moment right now mainly because we haven’t developed a an ew counter program we haven’t really developed a way to shoot them down we haven’t really developed a way to atrp their ability to uh to fly and supposedly I think it’s Ukraine was losing 10,000 drones every week roughly and that could be an enemy fire that could be to electronic warfare now for every for every sword there’s a shield so someone develops a weapon then someone develops a countermeasure drones might be having their moment right now because nobody has created a really effective counter measure against these drones however I can tell you as as a guy who has a job working at a a drone startup that makes AI powered drones uh once we can load artificial intelligence onto these drones and drones will be able to navigate without using GPS or without using commands from a an operator uh that’s going to be kind of interesting because those kinds of drones are going to be almost impossible to stop unless you stop them kinetically so I think drones have changed Warfare but I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be the case going forward because there are going to be countermeasures developed uh because this has been such a unique uh moment in uh Warfare history so you work in cyber security and you have a strong understanding of how that is so what do you think about cyber do you think that there’s been more cyber attacks than usual in a war or what have we seen that’s unusual or unique in this war in the world of cyber Russia has tried cyber attacks against Ukraine those attacks really haven’t been all that successful mainly because Ukraine was the subject of a Cyber attack back in 2020 they learned their lesson there Ukraine has some pretty darn good cyber defenses and they’ve decoupled a lot of their infrastructure from the public internet uh if there’s no no way of attacking a network because the network is physically air gapped between uh the closed Network and the public internet then you can Cyber attack all you want you’re not getting over that that moat right so I think Ukraine has been very smart when it comes to cyber uh the Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have not been as effective mainly because Ukraine takes us very seriously and they have a lot of good engineers in Ukraine that know what they’re doing information Warfare is a little a little bit of a different story you consider information Warfare to be a subset of cyber but uh Ukraine is just very well prepared and very well decoupled mainly because of some cyber attacks they sustained in 2020 so overall though when you look at the battlefield you see what’s going on Russia’s just attempted a new offensive in kke how successful would you say that offensive was and what else you see happening on the battlefield it’s pretty bad it’s pretty bad and I I think a lot of that has to do with Ukraine’s c4isr or command control Communications computers intelligence surveillance reconnaissance uh you Ukraine is at the point where there’s so many drones in the air that Russia really can’t put together anything more than maybe a company because a company being U 110 soldiers uh maybe uh 12 tanks 12 14 tanks Russia just they can’t put together anything larger than a company to perform an attack because it puts out such a an electronic thermal and visual signature that Ukraine knows exactly where that attack is coming from and they can counter that attack with artillery with high Mars uh with drones just swarming fpv drones into a location uh so that that really blunted that Russian attack and plus Russia is suffering from the same problem that Ukraine was suffering from last year or last summer during the summer offensive and that is war is hard and fighting your way through minefields and prepared defensive positions against an entrenched enemy that wants to be there is very difficult and uh I don’t really see how Russia thought that their outcome was going to be any different than Ukraine’s outcome but when you’re when it’s a contest of metal when it’s a contest of Flesh against metal the medal usually wins and uh Russia just kept running right into the meat grinder and you ukine just kept grinding meat so it was not a very successful offensive by Russia and Russia probably should have known that Ryan there was awesome analysis I really appreciate your time today thank you so much Jay I’m so happy that you invited me on [Music]

Ryan McBeth is the creator of what is now one of the largest YouTube channels that discusses topics as varied as intelligence operations, disinformation, and how the military functions. Having carefully followed the war in Ukraine since its inception, Ryan gives the Kyiv Post his view of why F-16s may be a gamechanger for Ukraine; What is really happening in Russia’s Kharkiv Offensive; How this war has revolutionized the use of drones; and what exciting breakthroughs have been seen in the world of cyberwarfare.

According to his website, (https://www.ryanmcbeth.com/) Ryan “an intelligence analyst, software architect, cybersecurity guy, and YouTube content creator of military, intelligence and disinformation topics. He appears on NEWSMAX as an intelligence consultant and consults for Veloxxity on OSINT and information warfare.”

Ryan can be followed on YouTube and Twitter:
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