The Netherlands boosts Ukrainian F‑16s with €300 million in advanced weaponry

During the ongoing NATO summit, the Netherlands decided to increase the financial pool to purchase weaponry for Ukrainian F-16s by 300 million euros. Here's what the additional funds will be spent on.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense announced another support package for Ukraine, this time to arm F-16 aircraft. The package's value is 300 million euros, and like the previous package, it will be spent in the Dutch defense industry.

The Netherlands is among the countries that decided to transfer F-16A/B MLU aircraft to Ukraine. The range of weaponry for F-16 aircraft is very extensive, but mentions of the local defense industry allow for the narrowing of this catalog.

The Netherlands, one of the oldest users of F-16 aircraft, is also one of the weaponry manufacturers for these machines. For example, Artillerie Inrichtingen Armaments B.V. produces 20 mm caliber ammunition used in M61 cannons, and other entities are involved in the production of Mk 82/83/84 family aerial bombs weighing approximately 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pounds, respectively, as well as AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missiles.

For the mentioned aerial bombs, the Mk family models serve as the basis for producing JDAM-ER guided bombs by adding a guidance module with a control section and folding wings. This results in a precision weapon with a range of up to 43 miles when dropped from a high altitude, allowing it to strike targets beyond the range of most defenses.

These guided bombs have such destructive power that no field fortification can survive a hit. The effectiveness of using such bombs in Ukraine is seen on the Russian side, which, with their primitive copies, is causing enormous problems for the Ukrainians.

The AGM-65 Maverick missiles are capable of eliminating all or most Russian tanks from several dozen kilometers away. They are "fire-and-forget" missiles, except for the laser-guided variant, which requires target illumination until impact.

The "fire-and-forget" version uses a television seeker with a high-resolution daytime camera or an infrared camera from the AGM-65D version introduced in 1983. In simple terms, the launched missile finds and hits a target whose image was captured by the aircraft's systems and uploaded into the missile before launching.

The target is eliminated by a 124-pound shaped charge warhead, although there was also a variant with a 298-pound penetrating warhead designed for destroying bunkers. These are highly desirable capabilities that the Ukrainians sorely lack.