So just how badly are we depleting our own arsenal of military hardware as we keep sending more and more arms to Ukraine? You rarely hear a peep about this from our swamp-dwellers in Washington, but our supplies, particularly ammunition, are obviously running low. This week we tapped into an infrequently-mentioned stockpile that we keep in Israel for short-notice use, both for American missions in the Middle East and for our Israeli allies during emergencies. And as we’ve discussed here previously, Ukraine is burning through shells at a pace that far outstrips our domestic manufacturing capacity to replace them. At what point will someone in Congress stand up and demand some answers from the White House and the Pentagon? If there is a plan to address our munitions supply chain shortfalls so we don’t leave ourselves effectively defenseless, the public has the right to know what it is. (NY Times)
The Pentagon is tapping into a vast but little-known stockpile of American ammunition in Israel to help meet Ukraine’s dire need for artillery shells in the war with Russia, American and Israeli officials say.
The stockpile provides arms and ammunition for the Pentagon to use in Middle East conflicts. The United States has also allowed Israel to access the supplies in emergencies.
The Ukraine conflict has become an artillery-driven war of attrition, with each side lobbing thousands of shells every day. Ukraine has run low on munitions for its Soviet-era weaponry and has largely shifted to firing artillery and rounds donated by the United States and other Western allies.
A second reserve of artillery shells that we maintain in South Korea has already been tapped to the tune of hundreds of thousands of shells. You all remember South Korea, right? That’s the country where another of our allies shares a border with a nuclear-armed madman and it’s one of our closest bases of operations near China, which is currently threatening to invade our other allies in Taiwan.
But now it’s Israel’s turn in the barrel. Israel is constantly under threat from not only the Palestinian terrorists but the maniacal regime in Iran. It’s not like they might have a sudden need for military hardware, right? But we’re going to continue to deplete those supplies to prop up the dubiously “democratic” government in Kyiv which clearly wouldn’t last a week without our constant engagement in the proxy war against Russia.
As the linked report goes on to point out, this move creates even more complications for the Israeli government. Up until now, they have refused to send any lethal military aid to Ukraine, sending only humanitarian relief to the citizens of that country. They took that position to avoid further damaging their relationship with the Russian Federation. It’s true that these munitions are not technically the property of Israel, so they should be able to claim they weren’t involved, but this still complicates an already tense relationship.
We know that Germany, Canada, Estonia and Italy have all been sending 155 mm shells to Ukraine as well, but their stockpiles are pitifully small compared to ours. (Or at least the stockpiles we used to have.) In other words, the majority of the NATO alliance, and particularly the United States is currently disarming itself at a time when global tensions are higher than at any time since the cold war.
Is anyone in Congress going to stand up and ask why we are continuing to do this? What net benefit are the American people deriving from these costly investments? All we know for sure is that some people in the military-industrial complex are getting extremely wealthy at the moment, and that trend will continue as long as we keep flushing all of our military hardware down the rathole in Ukraine. If China decides this would be an ideal time to cross the Strait of Taiwan, do we even have the resources left to help the Taiwanese fight back? We should be calling on Kevin McCarthy to demand some answers to these questions or simply seal up the piggy bank and end this circus.
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