For the purposes of Lockheed's marketing campaign, the F-21 is a new fighter, although it shares many of its major features with the F-16V the company has sold to Bahrain, Greece, Slovakia, South Korea and Taiwan. Lockheed can build new F-16Vs or upgrade older F-16s to the V-standard.Lockheed Martin in mid-February 2019 offered to sell India a new fighter the company calls the "F-21."(This first appeared several months ago.)Only it doesn't look like a new fighter at all. The F-21 looks like an F-16.In fact, the F-21 is an F-16 that Lockheed has upgraded with new cockpit displays, conformal fuel tanks, a larger airframe spine that can accommodate additional electronics, fittings for towed radar decoys, a new infrared sensor and a refueling probe that's compatible with India's Russian-made aerial tankers."The F-21 addresses the Indian air force’s unique requirements," Lockheed stated.The rebranding raises an important question. At what point do upgrades transform an old fighter into a new fighter?It isn't a purely academic question. The number of different fighter types that a country simultaneously can produce is a useful marker of that country's war-making capacity.
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