President Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday that France would send Mirage 2000 fighter jets to Ukraine, in what would appear to be a significant increase in his country’s direct military support to Kyiv.
“Tomorrow we will launch a new cooperation and announce the transfer of Mirage 2000 [jets], which help Ukraine protect its skies,” Macron said during an interview with broadcaster TF1 in the northern city of Caen, coinciding with the start of an official visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The French president also said Ukrainians would receive training in France for five to six months as early as this summer, with a target of training 4,500 service personnel.
While any aircraft sent to ukrane is nice, I sure hope they aren’t paying much for them. That airframe is about 60 years old with the last major design overhaul in 1990 and its last electronics upgrade in 2000. They would be better off buying F15e’s or even the new f15ex. He’ll, even getting some last Gen f16’s or f18’s over there would be as good or better, but cost probably more. The f15 though is probably the best multiroll jet for the cost.
Now, if we are talking about sending some OG Mirage 2000 fighters over there, then that sounds like the ultimate white elephant gift France could give. The US could sent some F4 phantoms over while we are at it.
The big news I the training of 4500 pilots. That is huge. If they could do that, then the mirage 2000 could basically turn into their base fighter trainer and use it as the training wheels to get the new pilots experience and into bigger and better things.
Dude… the Viper’s a 50 year old design. Sure, we’ve kept updating it, but the A is (IIRC) still technically a bit better at BFM because it’s somewhat lighter. The Mirage 2k can still be deadly in the right hands. Also, I would absolutely put them on par with the MiG-29s they were getting.
Additionally, it’s kinda funny that Putin gets all pissy with the US because other NAFOs are donating F-16s, and yet they say nothing about the M2K, which is capable of launching an ASMP-A (tactical nuke cruise missile) - obviously they’re not giving them or training them on those, but neither were we or anybody else with the Vipers.
I know next to nothing about air combat, and less about the Mirage. But isn’t having more airframes in the air to shoot down more things still a net positive? It doesn’t look like anything it can carry has a long range. However even if they’re not used for anything close to Russian AA, can’t they still be quite valuable for, missile/drone defense in western Ukraine?