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That's what people were complaining about in Poland in 00s when we bought F-16 in addition to our MiG-29.

That the airplanes will be hard to maintain, aren't as rugged, can't handle street landing and improvised conditions. There was a huge scandal because one of the F-16 was flown from USA to Poland and did emergency landing on the way because of some minor technical issue.

20 years later and we lost two MiG-29 to bad maintenance and no F-16.

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That's because the F-16s might be in (and even 'owned by') Poland, but they're for the defense of the US. We're not going to let them fall apart.

No idea where Poland got that idea about F-16s as they have a reputation for being a reliable and robust fighter even before Poland purchased the planes, unlike the MiG-29 which is a maintenance queen (particularly the engines) and has a reputation for being a mediocre plane whose career mainly consists of being shot of out of the sky.

There was a competition between F-16 and Grippen :)

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