Clear Out the Inventories and Get Them Guns Now

Doing the Right Thing After Exhausting All Other Options

Reuters, Valentyn Ogirenko, February 10th, 2020

After months of delays that have cost the Ukrainian military hard losses, the United States has cleared the hurdle of passing a Ukraine aid package. Which of course gets to the question of what do we do now?

To get it out of the way, we’re obviously going to immediately start surging desperately needed ammunition to a Ukrainian military that is desperately in need of resupply in both artillery and air defense. This is the easiest choice to make, and the moment the bill is signed into law, pallets of 155mm rounds will be crossing the border.

Past this? The current administration needs to demonstrate a sense of urgency and utilize every dollar provided in this aid package before November 2024.

I don’t think I need to explain the dynamics of American domestic politics too forcefully here, but there’s an election this year. A Trump victory in November would almost certainly entail a cessation of American assistance to Ukraine, and the Administration needs to act within this reality.

While I’m honestly surprised that Speaker Johnson is still holding the gavel at the moment given the uproar in his caucus, and given the fact that the Ukraine aid passed with a majority of the GOP House members voting against it—I don’t like his chances of maintaining the Speakership going forward absent the Democrats voting to keep him.

The level of animosity within the GOP over this vote should be clear enough evidence that if the GOP takes the Presidency in November, there will be no future support.

Knowing that we’re under heavy domestic political constraints, our priorities ought to be constructed around what can be done in 6 months.

I realize everyone loves flashier items like the F-16, but these platforms take years of integration and training to utilize proficiently. They’re also not being provided in numbers that will achieve something like air superiority over Ukraine—these are platforms that will probably only be used for stand-off munitions. Using our limited funds to procure more high-end capabilities like this will misalign our current financial resources with our political constraints.

While it’s great to have long-range strike capabilities—these are essential enablers for any modern joint force—we shouldn’t be fixated on this right now.

Ukraine is also not really in a position to receive more high-end capabilities right now anyway, given that they’re currently mobilizing more of its population for military service. Adding more technically difficult platforms to the list of aid would only further complicate training requirements and make the process of integrating large numbers of conscripts an extremely challenging prospect.

Not only this but the Ukrainian military has been slowly pushed back over the past couple of months due to manpower and munition shortages alongside Russia’s industrial advantage and their adaptation of mass usage of UMPK glide kits. We need to help stem the bleeding before anything else—ATACMS isn’t much good when you don’t have any ammunition for your Bushmaster.

We should narrowly scope the provision of aid to military aid that is critical to the baseline functioning of the Ukrainian military—artillery, air defense, IFVs, HIMARS, and tanks—and leave other more niche capabilities to our European partners.

This fight is heavily predicated on massed artillery and ISR-enabled fires. Ensuring the survivability of Ukrainian forces should come before considering these more resource-intensive initiatives.

Ukraine can use Bradleys now and they can use them on the front to directly support their infantry. We can provide enough IFVs, enough spare parts, and enough ammunition over 6 months to ensure Ukraine can use this capability in the long term. We should similarly be providing M777s and the accompanying 155mm rounds. The same applies to Patriot batteries and PAC-2 and PAC-3 interceptors to force the VKS off the frontlines.

These systems will make an immediate impact on the battlefield and are all items that we can provide in mass.

Doing all of this in 6 months would of course probably piss off the DoD who would mumble incessantly about needing to maintain certain levels of munitions and systems in case a contingency arises, but the Administration needs to be prepared to empty our warehouses in the short run. At the end of the day, the DoD answers to the President, and if the Administration tells the DoD to do it, they will.

Yes of course this would mean taking on potential risks, but assuming we continue to stand up more production capacity, we would only be taking on risk in the short term before most of this would be backfilled.

Trying to align this funding over the long term to avoid depleting American munitions stockpiles runs into an even worse political risk—a GOP victory in 2024 and the end of aid outright. We need to act like this is our last opportunity.

We’ve managed to buy ourselves a chance to get the Ukrainian military back into the fight, but we need to take advantage of this opportunity. We need to get every piece of equipment we can into the hands of the Ukrainian military over the next 6 months. There should not be a single dollar of funding left by November. Otherwise, it might cost us our last chance to help Ukraine.