The last of the gunfighters will not be hanging up its holster any time soon. While the Trump administration has been playing Let's Make a Deal with Lockheed Martin and Boeing over the future of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Department of Defense has decided to extend the life of yet another old warhorse to fill the gap. At least 300 F-16 Fighting Falcons will receive structural and avionics upgrades that will allow them to fly until at least 2048, thanks to a Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) with Lockheed Martin.
The Obama administration had already made plans for the A-10 Thunderbolt to stay in service until 2022 to fill the close air support role and had plotted an upgrade to the F-16 as well since 2012. But the task of pulling the trigger on the F-16 upgrade was left to the Trump administration. "Following F-16 Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) structural modifications, the US Air Force could safely operate [F-16C and D] Block 40-52 aircraft to 2048 and beyond," Air Force officials said in a release.
The F-16 was a product of a push by a group of analysts within the Air Force known as the "Fighter Mafia" for a lightweight fighter?a counterpart to the F-15 Eagle in what was referred to as a "high-low mix" (with the expensive, high-tech F-15 being the "high"). The F-16 was the winner of a "fly-before-buy" bake-off?an approach to procurement that many critics of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter may be nostalgic for.
The Fighting Falcon entered service a bit less "low" than the Fighter Mafia (as embodied by John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, and Thomas Christie) may have wanted. But it has since become the workhorse fighter for over two dozen countries' air forces. And it has been the backbone of the US' air campaigns in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, even more than the fabled A-10?in the campaign against the Islamic State (also known as Daesh or ISIS), the F-16 has flown more than half of the 87,000 sorties flown against IS targets as of March.
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