Does the Air Force Need a New, Longer Range, Low-Cost F-16 Replacement?

By Logan Williams, Warrior Editorial Fellow

The F-16 was originally designed to be a lightweight, low-cost, and highly-maneuverable multi-role fighter aircraft, optimized for dog-fighting, which could augment the capabilities provided by the USAF’s more expensive, dedicated air superiority fighter, the F-15.

The F-16’s lightweight design is what enabled it to become such a versatile fighter jet platform, with superb maneuverability, for the time. However, the lightweight platform is also the source of the F-16’s greatest weakness. The F-16 was optimized for short-range dog-fighting, not the long flights required to penetrate deep into enemy-held airspace. The F-16 has a maximum take-off weight of approximately 40,000 lbs, which is very little compared to the afore-mentioned F-15 (which was designed for the long-haul flights required for air superiority missions, and has a max take-off weight of approximately 68,000 lbs). The F-16’s limited take-off weight is well surpassed by modern aircraft such as the F-22 (over 80,000 lbs) and the F-35 (65,000 lbs).

The F-16’s reduced take-off weight inherently limits the aircraft’s fuel capacity, which sits at just 7,000 lbs of internal fuel. Conversely, the legacy F-15 has approximately 14,000 lbs of internal fuel, the USAF’s newer F-22 air superiority fighter and the F-35 multi-role fighter have 18,000 lbs of internal fuel.

The drastically reduced fuel capacity of the F-16 reveals the airframe’s greatest weakness, which is the aircraft’s limited combat radius — the combat radius is the farthest distance that an aircraft can fly, and return, without requiring air-to-air refueling. The F-16 has a combat radius of approximately 300-400 miles. The F-15, the F-22, and the F-35 each have a combat radius that nears 1,000 miles. While this fuel capacity can be increased externally, with conformal fuel tanks or drop tanks, the added weight comes at a high cost to the aircraft’s weaponry. The result of this severe deficiency is that the F-16 is entirely dependent upon air-to-air refueling to operate.

During the development of the exceptional F-35 fifth-generation fighter, the Pentagon’s pursuit of new technological frontiers transformed this aircraft from a versatile and inexpensive concept, into a futuristic, high-tech, high-cost multi-role fighter jet.

For example, the F-16 can take approximately six months to a year to assemble from start to finish; the fly-away cost of the F-16 does not exceed $60 million, at its highest point. By comparison, the F-35 can take up to two years – or even longer – to construct, and has a fly-away cost of over $80 million at its lowest point.

It is interesting to note that, in the Biden Administration’s National Defense Industrial Strategy – the first of its kind, ever – two of the methods through which the Pentagon is hoping to achieve its goal of revolutionizing the acquisition process for defense materiel, are the limitation of the impulse to unnecessarily over-customize new weapon system designs, and the reduction of “scope-creep” or the problem of producing a weapons system that is no longer suited to the purpose for which it was commissioned due to the Pentagon’s happy-to-glad upgrading — i.e, the DOD wants defense contractors to stay on task.