plus, another thing to put on the table is how well it operates with the other hardware, the country's tactics and war discipline.

all modern armies work with the combined arms concept, meaning the air force for example it is not a separated entity, it needs the ground forces and the ground need them and so on, not as simples as 1 + 1 = 2.

this is one of the major flaws in ukrainian army, they received a bunch of hardware from different countries and different times, nato and warsaw, nothing combines with each other

I was going to say that F-16s have been steadily upgraded since then but then realized that they'll probably be given the oldest, shittiest, machines that could charitably fit a loose definition of "airworthy".

This is a common misconception, actually the F in F16 stands for Flight, denoting it is an aircraft or other craft capable of sustained flight, and the M in M16 stands for Meapon.