The United States has handed Ukraine billions in military aid, depleting some of its own inventories of weapons and munitions. This, some fear, may weaken the American military should conflict break out in other regions of the world.
It’s not too late for the United States to adjust to the rise in demand for weapons, but doing so will require greater production investment to keep the American military ready, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, said to the DCNF, “If we get this right, we will not only hasten the end of the war in Ukraine, but we would significantly alter Beijing’s readiness to engage in aggression in the future.”
If the U.S. wants to continue assisting Ukraine and prepare for battle with other superpowers, it needs to invest more significantly in weaponry and ammunition, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Spending billions to strengthen Ukraine’s military as part of international efforts to back its resistance to the Russian invasion has depleted U.S. supplies and sparked worries that the West would weaken its military in response to China’s growing threat.
Experts told the Daily Caller that the United States would need to drastically increase production to avoid further depleting its arsenal and impairing its capacity to respond to threats from China and other prospective adversaries.
“For U.S. policy makers, the critical question regarding our policy towards Ukraine is quickly becoming more a what we can do for Ukraine, not necessarily what we should do,” Dan Caldwell, a senior advisor to Concerned Veterans for America and vice president for foreign policy at Stand Together, told the DCNF.
“U.S. stockpiles of munitions are becoming dangerously depleted and it will take years for U.S. production capacity to catch up,” Caldwell said.
Since the Russian invasion, the United States has provided $17.6 billion in security support; since August, the Pentagon has taken $10.5 billion in weaponry and equipment directly from American stocks using the president’s executive drawdown prerogative.
According to an information sheet dated Oct. 4, this includes more than 1,400 Stingers, more than 8,500 Javelins, 38 coveted High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), and eight National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS).
Along with “money for training, maintenance, and sustainment,” it also contains tens of thousands of electronic communications and surveillance equipment.
According to analysts who spoke with the DCNF, all of that help has put the most burden on the defense industrial base since the Korean War.
After sending roughly 900,000 of the highly effective rounds to Ukraine, the United States has “pretty much run out of 155 millimeter Howitzers and 155 millimeter ammunition,” according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who formerly worked on Defense budget and acquisition issues for the Department of Defense (DOD).