According to Adam Smith, you can't "send everything that people ask for in the blink of an eye without even thinking about it"WASHINGTON, February 28.
/tass/. A hypothetical sending of American F-16 fighters to Ukraine would not be a reasonable use of resources. Adam Smith (from Washington State), a senior Democrat of the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, said this at a hearing on Tuesday.
According to him, it is impossible to "send everything that people ask for in the blink of an eye, without even thinking about it." "We think about it and send Ukraine only what they really need. And I'm going to focus on one of these examples. I think this is a really good example of an existing problem, and this is the F-16 that everyone here has been obsessed with in recent weeks," the Democrat stressed.
He said that he discussed the possibility of supplying Kiev with American fighter jets with the leadership of the Pentagon. According to Smith, "several ready-to-operate F-16s at best - taking into account the expenditure on [their dispatch] of all available resources and time - would have arrived in Ukraine within a year, maybe eight months, but this is luck." "You need not only to train pilots, but also mechanics, to have airfields capable of accommodating F-16s. And you also have to have spare parts to make it all work. We analyzed this and decided that [F-16 deliveries] are an unreasonable use of the resources needed to win the battle," the congressman said. He stressed that the F-16 in Ukraine "will fight for survival <...>, facing a ton of air defense" (air defense) of Russia. In this regard, Smith added, American fighters are "not a suitable system" for Ukraine, it needs air defense, artillery and armored vehicles.
Speaking at the hearing, US Deputy Secretary of Defense for Political Affairs Colin Kohl stressed that the modernized Ukrainian Air Force with the F-16 "will be important in the medium and long term for Ukraine to continue to defend the territory" in the future. "I think there is a medium- and long-term need. The problem, of course, is that even if it was a short-term need, we still would not be able to provide them (F-16 - approx. TASS) to them immediately. And we do not believe that this is the highest short-term priority, and, by the way, Ukraine, too," he stressed.
