The U.S. supply of weapons has never been enough for Kyiv. But for Washington and the Pentagon, there are broader concerns.
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — Virtually every day, a line of 18-wheel trucks loaded with weapons or ammunition pulls up to a sprawling warehouse here nestled near an asphalt runway stretching nearly two miles. Drawn from U.S. military depots around the country, the lethal cargo is unloaded onto pallets that will be packed aboard cargo planes bound for Europe, the next stop on its journey to the front lines in Ukraine.
But the initial war supply operation clearly wasn’t built for the long haul. As the grueling conflict continues with no end in sight, it has exposed flaws in U.S. strategic planning for its own future battles, and revealed significant gaps in the American and NATO defense industrial base. Stocks of many key weapons and munitions are near exhaustion, and wait times for new production of missiles stretch for months and, in some cases, years.
“Is it enough?” Zelensky asked rhetorically amid his many expressions of gratitude during a Wednesday night address to Congress. “Honestly, not really.”“We have to remember that this fight, this war, it is dynamic,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a recent interview in his Pentagon office. “When the situation on the battlefield changes, we have to be agile enough to change as well.”
“When you’re preventing, you’re taking the lead in the situation,” Zelensky told the students. “Preventive action would mean that the world is not ready to swallow whatever the Russians want to feed it.” “In the end, they did not provide us with all that much information,” the official added. “They were balancing their own internal politics. Or they had operational security reasons. Or whatever it was. But we did not have full visibility into there.”
He asked for 100. Austin, he said, again replied it was “impossible” and “made no sense.” The planes, Reznikov said he was told, were old-fashioned and slow, a “squeaky target” for Russia’s formidable air defenses. “This was understandable to me. It was reasonable. I said okay,” Reznikov recalled, throwing up his hands in mock surrender.Poland offered to send some of its Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets, but only if they were transferred to Ukraine via the U.S. air base in Germany.
Despite the lack of sophisticated weaponry, and to the surprise of much of the world, Ukrainian forces outfought the sluggish Russians in the Kyiv region. By the end of March, Moscow’s troops had withdrawn, and a new phase of the war that the United States, its allies, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had thought would be over in a few weeks was about to begin.After Russian forces failed to take Kyiv, they regrouped to eastern Ukraine behind a wall of heavy artillery.
A reporter traveling near the front lines outside of Kherson this fall found one Ukrainian soldier nervously awaiting delivery of more ammunition for a Soviet-era artillery piece that was older than he was. The 40 or so shells rolling around in the back of a truck were all he had left, said the 25-year-old platoon commander in Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade who asked to be identified by his call sign, Vognyk.
systems, and an unspecified amount of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket systems munitions, or GMLRS, the medium-range missiles to be fired from them. Agreement came only after the top levels of the Ukrainian government assured the White House they would not be used to fire into Russian territory. Biden drew another line at ATACMS, missiles with a range of up to 200 miles.
“I’ve got a lot examples with Stingers, artillery, HIMARS and more” about how the U.S. approval process works, he said. “It’s just a political decision. I absolutely understand that all the pro-Ukraine politicians in different countries have to have an internal agenda. It’s normal,” he said. An upcoming CSIS report on American readiness, Jones said, concludes that “the U.S. defense industrial base is in pretty poor shape right now. If you identify China as the ‘pacing’ threat, and an ‘acute’ threat from Russia, we don’t make it past four or five days in a war game before we run out of precision missiles.”
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