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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1644 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 26

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Ukraine

The long expected reality seems to be approaching that the EU will struggle to complete its promised contributions to the war in Ukraine:

Early this year, EU leaders promised to provide 1 million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine’s front line by spring next year in what would have amounted to a serious ramp-up of production. But the 27-nation bloc, for over half a century steeped in a “peace, not war” message and sheltering under a U.S. military umbrella, is finding it tough to come up with the goods.

“The 1 million will not be reached, you have to assume that,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, ahead of a meeting of EU defense and foreign affairs ministers in Brussels.

U.S. aid to Ukraine is also politically up in the air, but existing appropriations should last a bit longer

Militarily, Ukraine has some breathing space: Under previous spending bills passed by Congress, Mr. Biden can still draw about $5.6 billion in matériel from the military’s reserves (mostly thanks to a Pentagon accounting error that overvalued aid that has already gone to Ukraine).

For context, a $500 million drawdown in June was enough to fund Bradley and Stryker vehicles, air defense munitions, artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, anti-tank weapons, anti-radiation missiles and precision aerial munitions, according to the State Department.

And a pause in new funding does not affect existing Pentagon contracts under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. That means new weapons and equipment will continue to be shipped to Ukraine in the coming months and years.

As of May, the Defense Department reported that $5.6 billion had been contracted to produce items for Ukraine such as HIMARS missiles, tactical vehicles, radar, ammunition and many others.

I’ve also heard anecdotally, though cannot verify, that the DoD can just significantly undervalue the equipment they’re shipping over to stretch the remaining funds out longer.

Does anyone know how long it takes, very roughly, from funding being approved to the goods actually showing up on the frontlines?

It heavily depends on specific, it could be in hours (easy to transport off the shelf stuff already present in Poland), minutes (release of data/intelligence) or take years where you need to train people to fly F-16 or months to develop hardware/software links between NATO missiles and Cold War-era soviet planes.

Compare ammunition bought from/donated by Polish army and delivered from warehouse in the Eastern Poland to delivering from USA not yet produced and dedicated versions of tanks, but without very interesting secret stuff.

Or donating commercially available Motorola radios (this could be done and was done by random people who were able to recognize importance of such devices) vs getting through decisions whether to deliver ATACMS.

What the actual value of equipment and munitions sent is by no means clear, at least to me. Is it what it nominally cost to produce when it was produced? What it cost to produce inflation adjusted? What the deprecated value of it is? What the deprecated value of it is minus disposal costs? Is it what a replacement would cost?

If anything I think much of the aid has been financially overvalued to a ridiculous degree for optics reasons and now the accounting valuation may change as the optics or political viability of appropriating funds for sending aid change.

Newly produced munitions is hard to change how you valuate it though, it costs what it costs.

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