Lemmy thread about it is hilarious, you can observe as some libs are "Ukraine is winning" and "F16 are gonna change everything" but most of them already taken slow backstep from that position (took them barely 1,5 year!). You can already smell the post Iraq position shuffle in the air.
They'll still find a way to cope. Just like Iraq (Saddam was ebil dictatoor!), Vietnam (nuh-uh didn't lose!), fuckin Finnish War (muh hwyte deaff!), and many many more
No no, you see, having your weapon systems cost 5 times as much money as the opposing side's is a good thing actually. Clearly it means it's 150 times more effective, according to this marketing presentation I found from the for-profit corporation that makes it and then sells it to the military and this press release from the general whose entire career is intrinsically tied to it, both of whom couldn't possibly be biased in any way!
They seems average. They do have at least one significant flaw, that large air intake apparently suck up things from runway during take off, which is why the plane need clean airstrip and it could be hard to get when Russians can just strike wherever they want with missiles. And of course the enemy air superiority also make them abot as useful as every other plane, that is not very much after getting bombed while on land.
plus, another thing to put on the table is how well it operates with the other hardware, the country's tactics and war discipline.
all modern armies work with the combined arms concept, meaning the air force for example it is not a separated entity, it needs the ground forces and the ground need them and so on, not as simples as 1 + 1 = 2.
this is one of the major flaws in ukrainian army, they received a bunch of hardware from different countries and different times, nato and warsaw, nothing combines with each other
I was going to say that F-16s have been steadily upgraded since then but then realized that they'll probably be given the oldest, shittiest, machines that could charitably fit a loose definition of "airworthy".
This is a common misconception, actually the F in F16 stands for Flight, denoting it is an aircraft or other craft capable of sustained flight, and the M in M16 stands for Meapon.