‘We Haven’t Got This Figured Out Yet’, Pentagon Says of Ukraine Aid as US Runs Low on Arms to Send

The US and its allies have delivered more than $40 billion in military assistance to Kiev in 2022, with the White House currently pushing Congress to approve another $37.7 billion in additional arms and economic support. Moscow has repeatedly warned about the dangers such arms shipments pose.

Washington still hasn’t “figured out” how to balance weapons deliveries to Kiev and the mounting problems in replacing the guns, bullets, and bombs sent to the Eastern European country, Under Secretary of Defense Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s top bean counter, has indicated.

“High-end conflict consumes a lot of munitions and a lot of weaponry,” McCord told US media on Sunday. “We are also looking at the supply chain limitations. We haven’t got this figured out just yet.”

McCord complained that the danger of a fracas in Congress over the 2023 military budget, which promises tens of billions of dollars in additional aid to Kiev, threatens to undermine the Pentagon’s spending and rearmament priorities.

The official urged for outlays of at least $100 million in new cash specifically for munitions production, and warned that the existing industrial base and supply chain may not have enough capacity to meet requirements. “The supplemental that we have pending now has some explicit funding in it for industrial base capacity expansion,” McCord said, referring to the $37.7 billion request submitted to Congress.

“People haven’t seen [a large-scale conflict] in a while, so I think we’ve forgotten that with true industrial mobilization, there’s always a time aspect to it and it is never instantaneous,” Doug Bush, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology, said. “I think we’re closer to a wartime mode, which has been something I’ve been working on to build,” he added.

Other senior officials assured that the Pentagon is ramping up production as quickly as it can, with Army Secretary Christine Wormuth saying the military is turning the billions of dollars already spent “and getting that on contract – I would say two to three times faster than we normally do.” Wormuth pointed, for example, to the expansion in the production of 155mm artillery rounds. “We will be able to do 20,000 rounds a month” by spring 2023, she said, with this figure expected to increase to 40,000 shells a month by early 2025.

Pentagon brass did not have answers about where the tens of billions of dollars in weapons already sent to Ukraine for what media characterized as “a hot proxy war with Russia” have gone. Russian officials, Washington’s own European allies, and other countries have complained about arms sent to Kiev winding up in the hands of European gangs and terrorist groups.

Greg Hayes, the CEO of Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missile maker Raytheon, has warned that America’s stockpiles of these systems have been severely depleted, with the US using up “13 years’ worth of Stinger production and five years’ worth of Javelin production” in nine months in Ukraine.

Government and military sources recently told US media that Washington and its allies are running low on weapons to send to Kiev, with one NATO official saying 20 of the alliance’s 30 members are “pretty tapped out,” and the US is considering sending “older, cheaper” systems to the country, and asking the Ukrainian military not to expend costly missiles and shells on low priority targets.

As NATO continues to ramp up tensions with Moscow through its weapons support for Ukraine, the alliance is also ramping up drills and troop deployments in Eastern Europe, risking direct confrontation with Russia. On Saturday, media reported on a large-scale NATO cyberwar exercise in Tallinn, Estonia, about 200 km from the Russian border, with the drill simulating a global cyberwar, including attacks on critical infrastructure, the theft of intellectual property, and disruption of government services.

The Western bloc is also increasing its physical presence on Russia’s borders, with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announcing last month that the NATO grouping near Russia’s borders had grown by 250 percent since February to some 30,000 troops.