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Sometimes, a news story seems so ordinary that it barely garners any attention, even as it turns the world upside down. Sometimes, innocent frolicking on the surface distracts from a rot extending below. This is what happened last week, when the Biden administration announced its plans to send an additional $300 million to Ukraine, meant as a stopgap until Congress can finally pass a funding package. According to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, this aid package was made possible by “unanticipated cost savings” in various contracts with the defence industry to replace equipment already sent to Ukraine.
At first, it seemed like a benign piece of news. What, after all, is wrong with saving a bit of money? Yet the reality is far more complicated. What Jake Sullivan actually announced wasn’t merely a case of finding $300 million of change under a Pentagon sofa cushion, but another sordid act in the slow-rolling and underreported drama that is the ongoing collapse of the American military.
To understand why, it’s useful to begin with some basic facts about America’s military aid to Ukraine. When the Pentagon decided to send weapons to Kyiv, these were mostly taken from already existing stocks. This was unavoidable, for at least two reasons. First, US munitions production was wildly inadequate to cover wartime demands. Second, the lead time for new production was simply too long: many of the weapons ordered for Ukraine in 2022 would realistically only be ready for use after the war had concluded. And so, the United States stripped its own warehouses of equipment — and it didn’t stop there. In some cases, it looted ammunition and weapons from its own combat formations. In others, it stripped many of its allies, such as South Korea, of a large amount of their equipment, too.
All of which raises an important question: when one sends an already existing weapon to Ukraine because producing a new one is too impractical and slow, how much does that weapon really cost? Unfortunately, there isn’t a straightforward answer. For instance, some of the weapons sent to Ukraine were no longer in production, and in fact could not be produced anymore. This could be due to their electronic components being obsolete, the factories and tooling having been sold off, the manufacturer being defunct, and so on. So, while the US Army might indeed have paid around $40.000 for a Stinger missile in the mid-Eighties, extrapolating the cost of one today is at best a matter of guesswork. Even in less dramatic cases, where the munitions are still in production, costs can still be subject to extremely high volatility: the price of acquiring 155mm artillery shells for Nato allies has roughly quadrupled since the start of the Ukraine war.
For America, this made it possible to send huge quantities of Nato weapons to Ukraine, while merely guesstimating the real cost of those weapons. And unsurprisingly, this has massively incentivised making optimistic estimates: the less you say the shells and rockets are worth, the more of them you can send within your allotted replacement budget. Of course, if you lowball your cost estimates, or inflation and labour scarcity mean that it is no longer profitable for the defence industry to produce at that price, the end result is a form of budgetary looting. Something has been taken away, money has in theory been allocated to replace it, but either due to naivete, corruption or malice, that money is not sufficient to actually pay for replacements. Ultimately, you’re left with a big hole in your budget, and a big hole in your military readiness. Whether costs are intentionally lowballed or simply underestimated doesn’t matter; the result is the same. The US political class, having long believed that their country can go anywhere and do anything, are simply not in the mood to take no for an answer.
Nor is budgetary raiding confined to the Ukraine war. When, for instance, Congress didn’t want to allocate funding for the extremely polarising issue of the southern border wall, the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of simply taking that money out of the US military. Elsewhere, the US Navy is currently planning to pay for its ongoing operations in the Red Sea by taking money out of funds it previously had allocated to badly needed modernisation programmes. In other words, the Navy’s budget is being cannibalised: critical future investments are being eaten up in order to sustain daily operations.
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If true. But who can one believe nowadays?
Plus I’ve been reading about the imminent collapse of the US economy due to the budget deficit for decades. It always seemed believable, I even made investments based on such advice and lost quite a bit.
It’s true that reports of the US economy’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
On the other hand, if you predict the Jenga tower will collapse after taking out one brick, and it doesn’t. Then you predict it will collapse after taking out the next brick, and it still doesn’t – does that mean we can keep taking bricks out and it will never collapse?
You’re quite correct. And when the Jenga tower does fall, it doesn’t fall in a slow cascade but in a sudden collapse.
And the Jenga towers of all the US allies will fall at the same time.
It is true.
The deficit is one of those things that won’t be regarded as a problem until one day, all of a sudden, it must be. When we get there it’s gonna be ugly. We could avoid it, but that would take both parties agreeing, in good faith, to work together to produce the combination of tax increases and spending cuts necessary to balance the budget. Sorry. Bad choice of words. We can’t avoid it. And it’s gonna be ugly.
‘The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent’ John Maynard Keynes
Sounds like standard government accounting to me.
Very good article – but very clickbaity headline. Essentially, this is *not* about Ukraine, so why pretend it is?
From the article:
The US system of governance is effectively not working. From my viewpoint a main reason would be that one of the main parties has systematically tried to sabotage the system, block the budget and close down the government, refusing to debate bills that would have passed with bipartisan support, etc.. ‘Starve the beast’, as they say. Those who know more could probably find more fault on both sides. But this is the real problem. What can be done to make the US government function again? Now that really would be worth some big headlines.
So what party and President are allowing flooding of USA with illegal immigrants?
A further problem, not sufficiently acknowledged, is that of Iran (you know, the Death to America, Death to Israel country currently arming and supporting proxies in the Middle East) which now has enough weapons grade Uranium to make 13 nuclear weapons in short order. Not only that – they are now supplying weapons to Leftist regimes in South and Central America. Specifically Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba while seeking to establish good relations with Brazil and Bolivia.
As if that wasn’t threatening enough, an article by Sasha Lensky in The Spectator yesterday warned of the growing power and influence of Islam in Russia. It is estimated that by 2030 about one third of Russia will be Muslim. Before too long the freedom of the West may depend on winning a war (cold or hot) against the Islamist struggle for worldwide dominance.
The Russians will not be sqeamish when dealing with the Islamic menace, any more than the Chinese already are. One day we may be allies.
”One third of Russia” is much more than an easily tamed minority. The Islamist threat is routinely underestimated and one day we may desperately need to be allied with Russia. The spread of revolutionary Islam, allied as it is with anti-capitalist forces, may be a 21st century global threat equivalent to communism in the 20th century.
Why on earth would we intervene if Russia and Iran came into conflict? Isn’t that a win-win for the West? Anyway, this idea of “Revolutionary Islam” overlooks the fact that the Shiites and the Sunnis hate each other.
Yes but first we have to get rid of the current pro-Iran regime in Washington.
and the pro-islam regimes in UK.
And the price will be what?
Baltic States, then Poland?
Do you seriously believe that Russia will solve Muslim infestation of the West?
How?
We could easily solve Muslim problem if there was will.
Sorry this is xenophobic and ignorant garbage, (The Spectator, nothing partisan about them then?) Maybe you should go back to the Daily Mail?
Watch the interest on the debt. In time, and not so much time, that may consume the “budget”. Bottom line? Money isn’t real anymore; it’s whatever our insane government wants it to be. How long this charade can continue remains to be seen — and we will. When we are forced to acknowledge it, it will be over. Done. As in overnight. When the belief is gone, it’s like waking from a dream. Poof. Don’t look down.
I don’t understand why someone who has such obvious disdain for the United States keeps presenting himself as an expert on the United States.
The empire is teetering and far too many Americans pretend that if only the correct person is elected, all will be well. No, it won’t. That person, at best, may slow the runaway train that is federal spending and institutional rot, but four years is nowhere near the time needed to fix the systemic issues.
Our govt is not of, by, and for the people; it’s of, by, and for the donor class that rents, if not owns, virtually every member of Congress. Which is why they all hate Orange McBadman, even though he can’t unilaterally change the DC culture, either.
It’s worse than depleting munitions and stocks. There is also a hollowing out of troops through the systemic attack on the military’s primary constituency – white men. Tell them they’re not welcome long enough and they’ll come to believe you. And so it is with every branch but the Marines failing to meet recruiting targets. Those racist/white supremacist/Christian nationalists were good enough when they were a fighting force and not a social engineer’s petri dish.
So what? We all die?
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Russia – population about 147,000,000, GDP $1,86 trillion
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EU – population about 450,000,000, GDP $26.64 trillion
US – population about 341,000,000, GDP $25.44 trillion
.
And now both EU and US produce 10 times less 150 mm artillery shells then Russia.
You guys are too fat, too lazy and too cowardly. This is not how wars are won
I am not convinced the average Russian is any braver than the average American. Their punishments are worse, for sure. A key point is that the Russian shells are much, much cheaper, for one thing – those GDP figures are very misleading in this context.
Sorry, but this looks like an attempt to justify yourself.
Both the EU and the US are so technologically superior to Russia that it would be a matter of months, if not days, to reduce the cost of the production process of shells and gun barrels. Remember how quickly ships were repaired at Pearl Harbor or the Liberty class ships were built. I was shocked by the skill and determination of the Americans
But there is no desire now. There are words
The West’s industrial base is nothing at all like it was in the 40s. Back then there were factories and shipyards everywhere that could be repurposed – nowadays most of those factories are in China, Mexico or elsewhere. The US also had a great swathes of people who had benefitted from the New Deal initiatives – now they’ve a load of indebted tubbers, with most of the better educated with humanties degrees. The differences are night and day.
Their tanks are probably much, much cheaper too (which would be a good thing were it not for the fact that their specialities are incinerating their crews and lobbing their turrets into fields).
Andrew, I agree. Russians are the world champions in taking one for their country and they will suffer and sacrifice more than any other country’s citizen. The Ukraine war is all but over and may be by the end of summer. The only thing left now is the continuation of the needless and tragic killing of both countries’ soldiers and citizens. In the name of “whatever”. This war should have never started and the West’s “elites” have become tired of it and it will slowly fade until Russia accomplishes what they originally asked for. Hamas and Israel took the heat off and now the Ukraine war has become backwater boring.
Tragic for the Ukrainians, Russians, and the world.
Well said! How come you know this and I know this, but out governing elites still seem to be in the dark?
The West should look to outspend Russia by an order of magnitude, like they did in the Cold War.
It does take time to tool up, and Russia has been long preparing. And Russia is also importing a lot from North Korea.
Appreciate source your figures. Thanks
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The author should be asking why the Federal budget is in such deficit. The answer is that expenditure decisions are not being made in the interests of the American people. They are being made in the interests of various lobby groups, the armaments industry being one of the main culprits. The American empire is rotting from corruption on the inside.
There is no mystery about the causes of the deficit. Entitlements (Social Security and Medicare) are 45% of the federal budget, Interest on the debt is now the 3rd major expenditure, pushing military spending down to 4th place.
The deception goes beyond simple cost and budgetary issues – it’s the massive deception that the US and the West have anywhere near the industrial base to support the kind of expansion of capacity required to confront the Russians – let alone the Chinese. The systems aren’t designed to produce, their designed to manufacture political consent for the existence of the corporations that dominate their supply chain. All the chains are spread across electorates, across countries, to ensure they’re waved through. All of it butressed by the ‘efficiency’ of JIT deliveries that introduce bottlenecks at every stage. it’s money laundering more than military production.
Laying atop that is the monstrous deception that lies behind the notion of much of the West’s GDP – figures that routinely (and IMHO perversely) include entirely non-productive inputs from rental income, credit card debt, inflated healthcare costs and all sorts of financial chicanery. None of this supports the production of shells, missiles, mines or the technical personnel capable of building, maintaingin and eventually using them. The West needs to play catch up, but has ‘chosen’ a system of governance that has left it without the means to do anything significant about it.
In other news, in a recent poll the rate at which current US service personnel would recommend a life in the military to their kids now stands at 32% – down from 53% just a few years ago.
Anyone who thinks the West could prevail in a war with the Chinese or the Russians are the ones deceiving themselves. Short of a nuclear exchange we’d be ground down even if we were willing to pay the prices required. And why should we – all the conflicts in question are thousands of miles away anyway.
Looks like it’s nuclear war then.
Not true, Nato forces are vastly more powerful than Russia’s. That is why Russia needs to threaten a nuclear response.
Why should we oppose resurgent Russian imperialism and autocracy in Europe? Same reason we opposed Nazi imperialism and autocracy in Europe. To make the world safe for democracy.
Is the US dependable? Does anyone think the US would come to Europe’s aid in the event of a limited nuclear war? Do we think it’d risk its own cities if Russia launched against UK and France (as the only nuclear powers)? Trump and increasingly Congress is isolationist. Perhaps if the risk of US retaliation is perceived as low Putin might think it worth it if things don’t go to plan? Russia is vast ensuring survivability. Is that true for conventional war too? Does this article show that the US couldn’t fight Russia and China together? It would choose China to confront. Europe is on its own. Meanwhile we recruit fewer soldiers and more DEI advisors. Thank God for Ukraine, Poland and the Skandis.
The US was isolationist in the lead up to both WW1 and WW2, but it was eventually convinced to join those conflicts.
The overriding issue in the US today as shown by poll after poll is sealing the southern border. The question will decide the next election. Trump is strong on that, Biden only pretends to be. Europeans must understand this and dig deeper in their own pockets if they want to protect themselves from the latest madman to raise his head on the continent.
The author makes a lot of really good points, but I doubt either he or anyone else has a good grasp on how bad the situation truly is. Part of the problem is that the US corporate system has become too large, rigid, and bureaucratized, each company jealously guarding its government contracts and its profit margins. As the author says, we don’t honestly know how many weapons the US could produce and at what cost right now because nobody is trying to do that. Defense contractors are trying to squeeze every last dollar of profit out of their contracts using any legal method they can, and politicians and the Pentagon are trying to do things at an absolute minimum of cost because they know the American people won’t support that much even if Congress weren’t hopelessly deadlocked. They’re all hopping around a minefield of regulations and bureaucratic processes that add inefficiencies and obstacles to be overcome at every stage of production from mining the minerals out of the ground to putting the weapons into service. None of this is being challenged or changed because the Ukraine war isn’t truly important enough for the corporate, political, and military powers that be to expend the effort to change it.
So, before we buy wholesale into the author’s negativity, a bit of perspective. Contrast how the US is running the Ukraine war vs. how our geopolitical rival is doing. The author is right about how haphazard and piecemeal the US’s Ukraine war efforts have been, but even so, it’s been enough to fight Russia to a draw for two years. The US didn’t mobilize for war, or draft anybody, or rearrange its economy for war production, or any such thing. Russia did all those things. Their entire country is on a war footing. Let that sink in. The US and Ukraine are fighting Russia to a draw despite all the problems the author mentions. We can debate whether that says more about Russia’s problems, Ukraine’s unexpected patriotism, or the effectiveness of US military aid however expensive and insufficient it has been, but we can’t take away the basic reality on the ground. Yes, Russia is winning the war, but at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and millions of dollars of destroyed military equipment, while the US has expended a tiny fraction of its overall might due almost entirely to political and economic considerations being given priority over military success. I’m reminded of the phrase first supposedly uttered by the Greek King Pyrrhus upon defeating the Romans but spending most of his army doing so. His advisors congratulated his victory and he supposedly responded, “another such victory and we shall be utterly ruined.” Russia is fighting only Ukraine directly and only barely winning while the US is half-assing it and playing political games the same way they have in every conflict since Korea.
Every country has strengths and weaknesses. The author has correctly pointed out many of the current weaknesses in the US system. Ukraine though, is not an existential threat for the US. The US isn’t transitioning to a war economy. The people wouldn’t support it even if the military and the politicians did, so the military advisors and politicians who want to pursue this proxy conflict are doing what they can with limited political and popular support. It looks incompetent and inadequate because of political constraints rather than logistical or economic constraints. It’s hard to even say exactly what those economic and logistical constraints even are. It’s hard to know what one can do until one actually makes the attempt. The question then becomes, what would the US be capable of it if actually mobilized WWII style? Nobody knows and most people quite sensibly don’t want to find out because such a conflict would be devastating in every conceivable way.
Geopolitics is relative. The US doesn’t have to compare itself to the USA of 1995 or even 1945. It has to compare itself to its present geopolitical rivals. It doesn’t matter how incompetent or weak the US defense industry is if nobody else is any better off. Whatever problems the US has, and we all know what they are, they are still so powerful that there are realistically just a handful of nations that could sustain a conflict with the US. Almost all the world’s advanced weapons are produced by either the US, Russia, or China with everyone else being dependent on one or another of the three for most of their supplies. Other nations, like India, are working to develop their own defense industries, but that will take years or decades. Russia has proved incapable of conquering just Ukraine backed by US/NATO weapons. Given that reality, it would be borderline suicidal for Putin to pursue a direct conflict with NATO. The only conceivable foe who has enough combined economic, military, and industrial strength to push the US into mobilizing for war would be China. We don’t truly know what a mobilized US would look like or be capable of and most people quite sensibly don’t want to find out. Ukraine certainly reveals a lot of problems and weaknesses in the US, but the question is how many of those problems and weaknesses are simply a function of a lack of political will. How many are a result of lacking industrial/production capacity and how many are a result of accountants counting pennies to raise profits or cut costs. How many could simply be washed away in a significant political tide. I myself am fine with not knowing.
The US isn’t transitioning to a war economy.
That is probably true, and I think that means that Europe will have to transition to one. The US helped Western Europe a lot during after WW2, and it is likely that Europe will have to step up and deal with the biggest threat to world peace at the moment (Russia).
I’m not sure Europe could transition to a war economy at this point, and I’m not sure it would make much difference. As much as the US has suffered a decline in manufacturing power, Europe is even worse off. I’m just not sure how much could even be done in the short term. To me, Zelensky needs to accept the reality that his strategic position, while not good, is unlikely to get better and call for negotiations. The best chance for Ukraine to retake territory was the unsuccessful summer offensive. They have little hope of any further gains. On the other hand, the risk of losing further territory is real, as Ukraine will run out of money and men long before Russia will, especially without the help of the US. Give up a lot to keep Ukraine independent or continue the war and risk losing the country. Those are the choices. It sucks but it’s the nature of war.
Yes, if only your suggestion eventuates?
Istanbul Spring 2022 ‘paraphé agreement’ for ‘neutrality’ although not finalised, may have prevented unholy suffering of populations and military deaths and maiming, was quashed. The interim has seen the pauperisation of Europe, de-industrialisation of Germany, inflation and rise of strikes and rightwing parties across EU. Not to mention the ongoing and disasters for the war zone civil populations and displaced. Can there be no progress, better policy, since Lord Ismay in the 50s?
The biggest thraet to World peace is now, and has been since WW2, the country which has been involved in over 70 conflicts throughout the World. That country is USA, which has also instigated most of them, including the current war in the Ukraine.
Endlessly reducing the tax rates does not help either