Steven Moore

🇺🇦⚡️🇺🇲✈️ F-16s Combat Aviation Sustainment in the Battle over Ukraine 🇫🇷🇪🇺After weeks of mounting turmoil, with French bonds selling off sharply even against heavily indebted Italy and street protests flaring, US media gleefully show the sated French middle class sipping Aperol at pavement cafés, at ease in a country where public expenditure amounted to 57.3 per cent of GDP in 2025. The couples barely notice the listless left-wing radicals and disaffected youths in the banlieues, whom France failed to provide with growth, jobs, and a place in its society, joylessly torching laughably small and badly maintained cars beside their bistro patios. Blasé and désolé are bien synchronisés. ⚔️Meanwhile, there are still real bloody battles in Europe. Violence. Death. Destruction. Devilish torture and deprivation. Mais, plus ça change – the bored elites and their electorates in Western Europe say, whilst European governments are reported to have issued roughly 800,000 tourist visas to Russians, according to Finland’s prime minister. 🇪🇸🪆Holiday largesse in roubles for Spain and the Route du Soleil; in a separate Spanish trafficking case, police reported seizing 644 weapons in an investigation involving an armourer trained in the Russian army. 🇧🇪Why does it matter, as Monsieur Dupont in Bruxelles ponders whilst dipping into the petty petits fours, and where again is that Melania ceasefire cake those Ukrainians should rather eat than complain: the Gâteau Chiffon Holodomor? 🇺🇦Well, in the real world, there seriously is no time like the present. There is even less time in the skies over Ukraine. Seconds mostly. Fox Two. Hit or miss. Reacquire the target, eliminate the enemy, its Geran drone, its Krasukha electronic warfare system, its air defence S-300 unit or shoot down that cruise missile to protect a Ukrainian hospital or kindergarten, the classic Russian military target. ⚡️The wear and tear in sustained modern aviation combat over Ukraine exceeds everything Monsieur Dupont could imagine and even the peacetime Belgian engineers, trained on American manuals, well-paid, well-rested, and content, could fathom from the lighter tales of woe Les Américains from Basra and Kandahar were brandishing over a Jupiler. 🇧🇪Belgium’s standard working week is 38 hours; a wartime maintenance system must nevertheless be funded and staffed for continuous coverage. If the Belgian military engineers, their civilian counterparts at Sabena Engineering, and all their superiors could not imagine such intensity, how should their bien nourris and replets politicians be able to comprehend? Well, let’s break it down: 🇺🇦Consider the scale. On 25 October, President Zelensky reported that Russia had attacked Ukraine with nearly 2,300 strike drones, approximately 1,600 guided aerial bombs, and 48 missiles of various types in the preceding week alone. Within that wider air campaign, Ukraine’s F-16s are already contributing: on 29 September, Ukrainian Air Force commander Lieutenant General Anatolii Kryvonozhko reported that their crews had destroyed more than 3,150 aerial targets, including 666 cruise missiles and approximately 2,500 drones, and conducted over 650 strikes against enemy ground targets. These are Ukrainian official figures, but they describe the breadth of the task: defending the population while supporting the forces fighting on the ground. Both missions depend on aircraft returning to service repeatedly. Belgium’s own defence minister confirmed to parliament on 14 October that the returning Ukrainian F-16s require recurring maintenance after every 300 flying hours. Every additional mission therefore brings the next inspection closer, alongside its requirements for weapons, fuel, personnel, and replacement components. The industrial obligation follows directly: the coalition must return aircraft at least as quickly as operational flying generates maintenance demand, with additional capacity to recover the backlog and absorb unexpected repairs. Otherwise, the effort to defend Ukraine today progressively consumes the aircraft available to defend it tomorrow. 🇪🇺Europe, rather than remaining shocked, awed, and eventually bored, should establish a funded, multinational emergency programme without undue delay, no hesitation, no café au lait. The programme must return Ukrainian F-16s to service faster, expand the industrial capacity supporting them, and prevent recurring maintenance from consuming the fleet it has taken years to assemble. Starting tomorrow, it should purchase additional European capacity, recruit experienced American and allied maintainers, restore scarce-component production, and build approved maintenance capabilities inside Ukraine. Its organising purpose must be sustained Ukrainian combat aviation: air defence, support to the land campaign, and the wider contest over Ukraine and the Black Sea. If it want to exert serious influence and for Ukraine to win the war Europe must organise itself to overcome the difficulties of sustaining donated fighters at the speed this war requires. @jimgeraghty Jim Geraghty’s recent reporting brought that question into sharp public view. Instead of indignation and passive aggressive repliques ministers and contractors should answer it with aircraft returned to service and a credible expansion programme. Even improved monthly output can fall short of demand, while a technically valid explanation may describe a problem governments have allowed to persist. Operation Battle over Ukraine is a proposal developed for immediate action. It combines three (or four) European centres, a cadre of experienced maintainers, a common production programme, and a plan to develop maintenance in Ukraine. A comprehensive operating directive forms the centre of our essay. Its targets are proposals to be tested and funded. The ambition is to make this Europe’s most effective sustained combat-aircraft repair mobilisation of the post-World War II era. The production record will be decisive for the defence of freedom and show whether that ambition is fulfilled. You can find our Substack article note in this 🧵1/2 @MooreUSA @gregbagwell @ChuckPfarrer @DrChrisParry @John_ForemanCBE @Aviation_Intel

🇺🇦🇧🇪🇺🇲 Solid piece by @NRO's finest and #ThreeMartiniLunch legend @jimgeraghty on how dithering, sloth & being simply slow in wartime costs lives not just time & money. #Belgium nos chers amis, get to work on F-16s rather than into the streets. Ceterum censeo: whilst you are at it, Monsieur De Wever, box your fears, stop the wavering, release the frozen Russian assets at Euroclear for Europe to fund Ukraine's defence. There is no excuse anymore. We need to arm #Ukraine to the teeth. @MooreUSA @KeirGiles @John_ForemanCBE @DrChrisParry @SchullerKonrad @gregbagwell @ChuckPfarrer