The United States and its allies are considering providing the Ukrainian military with new fighter jets as Russia’s war stretches into its sixth month.
Gen. Charles Brown, chief of staff of the Air Force, said during the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that the Pentagon could come up with a number of different options if it decides to move forward.
“There’s a number of different platforms that could go to Ukraine. … It’ll be something non-Russian. I could probably tell you that,” Brown explained. “But I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be.”
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The options on the table that Brown referenced are Swedish Gripen fighters, the Eurofighter Typhoon, and French Rafale fighters.
The Biden administration previously squashed a proposal to transfer old Polish fighter jets to Ukraine and replace the ones Poland would be giving up.
In the proposed plan, Poland would transfer its fleet of MiG-29s to the U.S. military’s Ramstein Air Base in Germany as a middle step, and the Pentagon called the possible deal “high-risk” and not “tenable” at the time.
Then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the time that the intelligence community was concerned that the proposal could be “mistaken as escalatory and could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO.”
There is also the challenge of training Ukrainians on whichever fighter jets the U.S. may provide, though the U.S. and other allies have already trained Ukrainians on other weapons systems.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Brad Bowman told the Washington Examiner that the calculation in training Ukrainian service members has changed since the beginning of the war.
“It would take time to train Ukrainian pilots on new aircraft, but those challenges are surmountable if there is sufficient will on both sides,” he said in a statement. “In the early weeks following Putin’s unprovoked invasion, these training challenges were sometimes used to reflexively shut down conversations regarding the provision of NATO equipment. That slowed the provision of NATO equipment to Kyiv that was desperately needed. We are now providing significant NATO equipment to Ukraine, and those training challenges that seemed insurmountable in March have been managed.”
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“We should expect that some of these aircraft would be destroyed by Russian forces, but the provision of U.S. aircraft to Ukraine could have a major positive impact on the battlefield as Ukrainians defend their homes against this unprovoked invasion,” he added. “We might be able to advance two worthy objectives at the same time: helping Ukraine and divesting some older aircraft in the U.S. inventory that are consuming finite American financial and personnel resources that are needed to acquire and field next-generation aircraft.”
The U.S. has already sent more than $7 billion worth of military aid since Russia invaded, and a new aid package will be released in the coming days. The U.S. will send four more high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) to Ukraine as a part of the package, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday.
