As an outsider uninformed about the political machinations in the region, that sounds like an appealing course of inaction should F-16 be blocked. Especially if the F-4's have a few years' life left in them and are not extremely expensive to maintain.
This is the tremendous nightmare.The air force of the Mighty Turkish army consists of relatively non-modern F-16s from the 1970s.(I'm ashamed to say this, but when I see the disproportionate strength of our Air Force compared to the capabilities of our other forces, I start to think that we resemble Iran a bit).
Not to mention how our Greek neighbor, with an economy one-fourth the size of ours, has managed to build an Air Force with the money of
German taxpayers or how willing our
French friends are to assist them.They aren't afraid that the support they receive might be cut off because they evaluate the loss of qualified human resources as diaspora.
Maybe Israel's worst F-16 is equivalent to our most modern F-16 IDK.I don't even want to compare the two airforces.
I would like to live in a world where we have purchased 40 F 35s and own around 80-120 Block 70 Vipers.If we had continued to participate in the F35 project, our defense industry companies would have had a very good cash flow by now.Having and using a fifth-generation fighter jet would have helped us understand what it means.Thus, we could have had a more advanced vision for the Air Force in the future. We wouldn't have to worry about a modern Air Force like we do today.We could easily balance the power difference between us and our enemies/rivals with different platforms.
Of course, we left all of these behind for
single S400 battery.We demonstrated to the entire world in every conflict how outdated and behind the times Russian air defense systems are, and how easily they can be destroyed.We shattered them everywhere we saw ; with small, non-complex munitions, possibly valued at
50 thousand dollars at most .Then we tried to convince everyone that Türkiye's national security is depend on one single Russian Junk.