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..., U.S. aid likely is coming, soon. Lots of it.
While Johnson hasn’t announced the details of the House proposal he said he would bring to a vote potentially this month, there’s a good chance it will mirror the spending package the U.S. Senate passed months ago—a package that includes $60 billion for Ukraine, $34 billion of which is for weapons. The rest pays for the training for Ukrainian troops as well as humanitarian aid and other non-military assistance.
To put into perspective how much weaponry $34 billion can buy, consider that—in the first 23 months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine—the United States appropriated $45 billion for weapons for Ukraine.
Roughly half of that spending was in the form of direct commercial contracts the Pentagon negotiated, and paid for, on Ukraine’s behalf. The other half of the spending paid for new weapons for U.S. forces after the Pentagon donated their older weapons to Ukraine directly from U.S. stocks.
All that is to say, the aid that U.S. president Joe Biden, his Democratic allies in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House and millions of everyday Americans fought for, for six months,
should keep Ukraine flush with arms for another year or more.
Expect the fresh aid to pay for a lot of radars, radio-jammers, drones, boats, armored vehicles and engineering equipment. Especially expect it to pay for artillery and air-defenses—and ammunition for both.
That should mean more 155-millimeter howitzers on top of the roughly 200 howitzers the previous funding paid for, more High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems on top of the previous 39 and more Patriot and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System air-defenses batteries, adding to the single Patriot and 12 NASAMS Ukraine already has gotten from the United States.
And it should mean at least a million 155-millimeter artillery shells from the new ammo factory the U.S. Army built in Texas specifically to churn out shells for Ukraine. The Texas plant, as well as other new and expanded facilities that support ammo-production, depended on supplementary funding—and has been in financial limbo since Republicans cut off aid back in October.
With fresh funding, the Texas plant and a pair of similar plants in Pennsylvania can—likely within months—ramp up to producing 60,000 shells a month on their way to producing 100,000 shells a month within nine months. The Pennsylvania factories together produced just 15,000 shells a month before Russian widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022.
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