Morocco’s First F-16 Block 72 Flies: Can It Match Algeria’s Su-57E and Su-35?

Algeria operated 63 Su-30MKA, 40 MiG-29s and 42 Su-24MK2 strike jets in 2024, according to FlightGlobal figures cited by The War Zone: 145 combat aircraft against the 48 F-16s Morocco will field once the last Block 72 lands. Satellite imagery showed a Su-35 in Algerian markings at Ain Beida air base in March 2025, from a batch of 24 built for Egypt and never delivered; the IISS counted at least four more in Algerian colours in Russia, and the total delivered is unknown.

The Su-57E is the headline and the softest fact. Algerian state television said in February 2025 that Algeria was the type’s first export customer, giving no number and no price. In November 2025 the head of Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation, Vadim Badekha, said a foreign customer had received the first two, without naming the buyer. A phone video of a Su-57 silhouette near Oum El Bouaghi air base circulated in February 2026, Defense News reported, and leaked Rostec documents point to 12 Su-57s and 14 Su-34 bombers, but the true volume and cost are unclear and Algiers has confirmed no delivery.

Military Africa reported in June 2026, from unnamed sources, that Algeria was close to buying Chinese J-10C fighters and KJ-500 early-warning aircraft for delivery from 2027; neither Algiers nor Beijing has confirmed it. So the real comparison is sensors and networks against mass. Algeria’s Su-30MKA fleet is larger and longer-legged but older, and the one aircraft that would clearly out-sense the Block 72, the Su-57E, exists in Algeria in a number only Moscow and Algiers know: two, by Russia’s own count.

The Block 70 and Block 72 are the newest production F-16s, sold together as the F-16V or Viper and built on Lockheed Martin’s Greenville line. The War Zone explains that the two share the same avionics and mission package and differ only in engine: the Block 70 uses the General Electric F110-GE-129, the Block 72 the Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229. Army Recognition puts the two within 1.5 kilonewtons of each other in afterburner, a difference a pilot would struggle to feel, so customers pick the engine their existing fleet already runs. Every other Viper buyer so far chose the Block 70; Morocco alone ordered the Block 72. Air Data News counted 149 Block 70/72 fighters on order across six countries, 111 of them still in backlog as of February. Lockheed calls the Block 72 its newest and most advanced F-16, and no other African air force has ordered one.

The timing is notable. Morocco and Algeria are rearming in the same year with opposite suppliers, and each purchase answers the other. Rabat’s choice locks it into American weapons, datalinks and training for decades, backed by a Benslimane maintenance hub of more than 8,000 square metres that Lockheed said will expand from C-130 work to the F-16. Algiers, for its part, has bought what the State Department’s Robert Palladino called “one of the issues the United States considers problematic”, with CAATSA sanctions possible, Defense News reported. North Africa’s air-power race no longer stops at the Nile: Egypt’s Rafale build-up and the KC-10 tanker notice now have a western counterpart in Rabat’s AESA-equipped Vipers.