Wouldn’t the Russians just hit the runways with cruise missiles? Maybe a Harrier jump jet might make a better surplus fighter for Ukraine.
Some f35’s do VTO. Is that what we are going to supply?
“Wouldn’t the Russians just hit the runways with cruise missiles?”
The Russians have started using some really old missiles, even ones that use liquid fuel. (Think SCUDS, but air launched.) They were designed to carry nuclear weapons but can deliver up to a ton of conventional explosives. Given that they were designed to carry an extremely powerful weapon the guidance is not what you’d need for a one-ton weapon to be effective against a particular target. They recently took out a shopping center. The probable target was an industrial plant.
The Russian “high tech” weapons turn out to use a lot of Western produced technology, which they can’t get. They have probably burned through a substantial amount of their inventory of precision weapons. Remember, any cruise missile built would mean less gold gilding on someone’s super yacht.