Send Ukraine F-117As
The Russians have already seen all it's secrets, and lend-leasing a handful of NightHawks to the Ukrainian Air Force would enable deep strike, plus give Russia more things to think about
Per the excellent recent RUSI paper by Justin Bronk with Jack Reynolds and Nick Watling (and see Mr. Bronk’s video interview with Ward Carroll), Ukraine’s air force remains outmatched by Russian Aerospace Forces (Воздушно-космические силы thus in Russian: ВКС, phonetically Vozdushno-kosmicheskiye silly, here throughout as VKS) fighters in air-to-air combat engagements, even with Russian fighters now operating well back of the frontline to stay out of the Ukrainian Surface to Air Missile (SAM) envelope. This mismatch, offset only by the skill and daring of ever fewer Ukrainian fighter pilots, is simply due to the geometry and kinetic landscape of these engagements, with the extensive Russian S-400-class long-range SAM capability forcing Ukrainian aircraft to stay very low. As a result, Ukrainian Mig-29 and Su-27 engaging the more modern VKS fighters using their Soviet-vintage air-to-air missile loadouts have engagement ranges compressed as they are firing uphill some 30,000ft to the Russian fighters, while VKS Su-35S and Mig-31BM fighters with advanced look-down-shoot-down radars can much longer range more modern missiles from a much greater distance. The result is the front lines have become an air-to-air no man’s land with a few intermittent exceptions.
Air assets operating in the front line area, from the ubiquitous UAVs, from micro quadcopters to long-range optical platforms, to manned platforms such as both sides’ Su-25 fixed-wing ground attack aircraft and attack helicopters, face a massed gauntlet of man-portable air defense missiles (MANPADS for short, such as the Russian Strela or US Stinger). Both Ukrainian and Russian Su-25s and attack helicopters have, as a result, taken to area bombardment by lofting ripple-fired unguided rocket barrages vaguely toward enemy positions from safely behind their lines well within their own SAM coverage, hoping the ground pounders don’t panic and take a shot at them.
Ukrainian fighters forced to operate low also wade through this ubiquitous MANPADs threat swamp, and interviews conducted for the RUSI paper report the age-old problem of blue-on-blue antiaircraft fratricide is still around, now more intense when both sides fly effectively identical planform aircraft, and every Roman, Sergei, and Harry have their own crate of MANPADs.
Russian high-value interdiction targets behind the front lines, which under western doctrine would be engaged by penetrating tactical air, initially went unengaged. After NATO supplied long-range precision artillery such as the 155mm Excaliber round and precision-guided multiple-launch rocket artillery, initially fired from HIMARS. Ukraine has innovatively combined UAV target location, robust battlefield connectivity via a smartphone app and Starlink satellite internet, and the precision strike capability offered by these systems to interdict Russian “rear area” targets back to the GMLRS range limits of ~85 km.
While this significant new capability to hold Russian intermediate-rear areas at risk combined with Ukrainian ground forces’ grit, cleverness and guile have resulted in a series of reversals for Russia, that range limit has still created safe zones within Russian-occupied-Ukraine where Russian military logistics hubs and command and control assets can operate, albeit at lower effectiveness than if they were located closer to engaged Russian units. But these deep targets are not at risk without a shift in the front lines.
The Ukrainians cannot send penetrating air strikes into these rear areas because of the density of the Russian SAM threat and the VKS CAP, and they cannot reach out and touch these prime targets with artillery due to range.
Herein I argue that what the Ukrainian air force needs is stealth.
Low-observable stealth aircraft reflect much less radar energy back to the radar receiver than non-stealth aircraft, so they can operate undetected much closer to search radars without being tracked, and they are equally difficult to target with radar-guided SAMs.
The current-production western stealth fighter is the F-35 Lightning II, entering service with many NATO and allied air forces. The F-35 was designed to operate against Russian ground-based radar systems and fighter search radars, and it offers very robust attack capability. But the US Department of State and Department of Defense have blocked willing NATO allies from providing their old Mig-29s to Ukraine to help make up attrition losses so as to not “escalate” Western support for Ukraine. They would certainly object to providing current front-line US fighters. Besides, there is no spare inventory of F-35s sitting around available for transfer to Ukraine.
There is also a strong argument for protecting the technical secrets of the F-35 for as long as possible. Supplying jets into an active shooting war includes a built-in risk one will be shot down and become available for study by enemy boffins.
So what can the US supply that would A) not expose current uncompromised technology if shot down B) be arguably able to penetrate Russian SAM envelopes and hold all Russian rear areas at risk, C) be immediately available from mothballed US stocks, and D) able to be supplied to Ukraine without negatively impacting US warfighting capabilities?
The US 1980s technology F-117A Nighthawk.
While a few F-117As are apparently operational with the US Air Force as Test and Evaluation assets for technology development, most of the F-117 fleet retired in 2008 and is reportedly mothballed in their Nevada desert Groom Lake hangars.
The F-117A is a dedicated ground attack asset and does not feature any air-to-air radar or confirmed air-to-air capability, though some unconfirmed reporting asserted capabilities included infrared air-to-air tracking and sidewinder missile integration for minimalist self-defense.
Training Ukrainian pilots and ground support crews to operate and maintain the F-117A and supplying a small number of aircraft to Ukraine would change the safe zone calculus of the entire Russian war effort.
And the Russians have already gained full access to the F-117As secrets. After a Serbian SAM unit managed to shoot F-117A tail number 82-806 down in March 1999, the Serbs reportedly gave Russian Federation (as well as Chinese) technical experts full access to the crashed airframe, including providing wreckage samples and specific pieces of equipment for home study.
Notably, the Soviet-era SA-3 battery that shot down that F-117A did so using backup manual guidance and thermal imaging, taking advantage of some remarkably slack mission planning which repeated the same routes in and out of the same target areas multiple nights. Various Russian marketing materials claim that various new Russian radar systems can detect western stealth aircraft, often using search frequencies radically different than those the F-117 was designed to defeat. But those search bands, often longer wavelength, do not provide precise enough data for SAM launches, and SAM track radars still have a hard time with F-117A-era stealth materials.
Bottom line: If the Ukrainians did lose an F-117A the Russians would gain access to nothing new.
And Ukraine could make excellent use of the capabilities of this jet, enabling them to threaten all of Russian-occupied Ukraine.
If upon reading that last bit you suddenly hear a faint but horrible screeching noise, it’s not your computer losing a fan bearing. It likely is instead the sound of the de-escalation factions within the Puzzle Palace and Foggy Bottom emitting wailings and gnashings at the thought that Putin might become offended.
Certainly the Russian intel guys would dust off their Soviet assessments noting range and payload, providing notes1 that the Ukrainians might use their new-old F-117As to attack the Real Rodina, mother Russia itself.
Well, yes, that last is the capability, but for action capability must be matched to intent. GMLRS could range far into Belgorod or Kursk or Bryansk Oblasts from Ukrainian territory, but agreements with NATO have restrained Ukraine from lobbing GMLRS warheads at juicy targets in those regions of Russia along their northern border. Similar restraint agreements could be announced when the jets are publicly delivered.
But causing the Kremlin to fear their actions going forward might have more direct consequences than previously calculated is not all bad.
Setting aside the argument that President Biden’s public off-teleprompter comments already blew up any such, all the talk about the need for a “golden offramp” for The Shirtless Tsar assumes there is currently any downside for Vlad’s continuing the war until all Russian resources are exhausted and Russian society itself fully collapses into the worlds largest failed state: Local warlords with loose strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems! Oh My!
It would be best not to let things proceed quite that far - that is, it would be best to simultaneously introduce disincentives to the raft of undesirable choices while very publicly building some of those golden offramp positive incentives for the Kremlin folks who make Vlad’s soup and tuck him in at night.
“После меня наводнение” is what Microsoft translate says is the Russian equivalent to “Après moi, le déluge”. Lend-Leasing F-117As to Ukraine would both aid the Ukrainians in their quest to expel the Russian invaders and also would be a way to appropriately frame few of Putin advisors’ mindsets to consider whether their collective national future, or indeed their personal future, is sufficiently Putin-deluge-proof.
Aside: Are Russian intel briefs in Powerpoint too? What if Microsoft canceled all the Russian PowerPoint licenses - would that cripple them as it would the US Intelligence community?