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Notes -
Ukraine
The long expected reality seems to be approaching that the EU will struggle to complete its promised contributions to the war in Ukraine:
U.S. aid to Ukraine is also politically up in the air, but existing appropriations should last a bit longer
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.
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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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