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Stealthy fighters sought for busy skies above Syria, Iraq.

The Air Force wants to deploy the stealthy F-35A Joint Strike Fighter in the air campaign against the Islamic State, citing the increasingly complex operating environ- ment over Syria, but it’s not clear that it will be able to do so before the conflict is over.

Gen. Herbert J. “Hawk” Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, told reporters in Washington on Friday that the deployment could come in the “not-too- distant future” but added that a deployment to the Middle East is probably a couple of years away, after the F-35A deploys to Europe and the Pacific. The plane would give commanders in the campaign against the Islamic State a new weapon that can see other airborne aircraft better than any air- plane in the U.S. arsenal — a benefit as the U.S.-led coali- tion increasingly shares air- space with Russian and Syr- ian jets.

“It brings a lot of assets and a lot of attributes that would aid in the fight there,” Carlisle said, citing its advanced sensors and its ability to ini- tiate electronic attacks. “It’s a platform that we will take advantage of.”

The deployment is not yet imminent, but concrete discussions about it are new. They follow the Air Force declaring in August that the F-35A had reached its initial operational capability, with a single squadron manned and able to carry out basic missions, and come as the Pentagon weighs increas- ing the U.S. role in the fight against the Islamic State. The discussions also come as U.S. generals call for increased talks with the Russian mil- itary to better “deconflict” air operations and prevent aerial collisions.

C arlisle s aid that the “fifth-generation” capabil- ity of the F-35 and F-22 to detect potential adversaries in the sky makes older jets such as the F-15, F-16 and F/A18 better when they are net- worked together. With the Air Force beginning to tran- sition squadrons of jets from older models to the F-35A, it also will need to deploy them to rest and refit other units, Carlisle said.

The discussion comes as the Air Force already has F-22 Raptors over Syria and Iraq, in part so U.S. aircraft avoid collisions with aircraft from other nations.

The United States established a method by which the two countries “deconflict” their operations over Syria in 2015 after Russia began bombing opposition forces there on behalf of the Syrian government, but Russian pilots do not always respond to communications from U.S. pilots. In a few cases, Russian jets have flown close enough to U.S. planes to cause turbulence felt by American pilots.

The Raptor has been kept at or near the top of formations of U.S. aircraft, allowing them to better see the battlefield for other American pilots. With their stealth technology, the F-35 and F-22 also are believed to be less vulnerable to detection from radar used with surface-toair missile systems, which the Syrian and Russian militaries have deployed.