Fly and fight. That's the mission of the F-16. And in the autumn of 1991 as the authors put together this pictorial tribute to the supremely successful Fighting Falcon, we had recently won a war in which the F-16 flew more sorties than any other aircraft. But the future was uncertain. The F-16 had been in production for two decades, was on charge with a dozen Air Forces, and had graduated into a mature, proven combat aircraft. Yet because of the sudden, sharp drawdowns in the size of US forces in the 1990s— caused not so much by changed Soviet behavior as by the crippling effect of debt on government—it was by no means assured that the F-16 would remain in production. There was a chance that our celebration of the most numerous free world fighter since the F-4 Phantom might come just as contracts for future purchases dried up.
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