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.
Why is this happening? In the interest of brevity, it’s sufficient to point out that the US no longer even has a regular budget process. Sadly, few people grasp just how dysfunctional Congress has become these days, and what consequences this has for many important institutions. More often than not, it fails to adopt a budget at all; and even when it manages to do so, the spending bills are chronically delayed. The most central, practical upshot of this is that most US spending is on a form of autopilot. For various reasons, making changes to spending, or reacting to new events or sudden needs, is becoming near-impossible.
When people today talk about the massive level of US debt ($34.5 trillion and rising fast) or the ongoing federal budget deficit (upwards of $1.6 trillion for fiscal year 2024), they often assume that these things are problems of the future. All agree that, at some point, these fiscal problems will start to truly harm the nation’s global standing; people simply disagree about when this will start happening. Unfortunately, the reality is that the massive debt load and the federal deficit is already beginning to destroy America from within. This is not a problem of the faraway future; it is a problem in the here and now.
With the fiscal sword of Damocles hanging over Congress, rather than assign additional funding to cover true cost increases, the name of the game is now budget trickery and budget raiding, shuffling money from one “pool” to another. But when that money is shuffled, it generally isn’t getting replaced. The “pool” that was drained in order to furnish money for something else remains empty, awaiting a refill that might never come.
It is this fundamental glitch in the US system that is now manifesting in all sorts of places, behind all sorts of headlines. So, when the Pentagon discovers some $300 million in “savings”, allowing for more equipment to be sent to Ukraine, this is in fact an accounting trick. But that trick belongs to a whole family of illusions, and their effect on the US military, taken as a whole, is rapidly becoming catastrophic. Thus, we now read stories about the US National guard temporarily cutting its retention bonuses in the middle of a massive recruitment crisis, or the Air Force removing special duty pay for many jobs within the service. Structural underfunding within the armed forces appears to be endemic.
Yet what’s particularly worrying is not even the lack of money per se, but the way in which the charade has been maintained. In the German movie Goodbye Lenin, the mother of an East German family falls into a coma right before the collapse of the Berlin wall. When she eventually wakes up, communism has already collapsed, and East Germany no longer exists. Her children, having been told that her mother’s heart probably can’t handle the shock of that revelation, then set out to create an illusory world around their mother. They raid pantries for older brands of foodstuffs, they put on fake news broadcasts, and they loot the attics of friends and neighbours for communist memorabilia.
Today, America increasingly resembles a sort of capitalist funhouse mirror version of this. Its political class is more of a grey-haired gerontocracy than that of the late Soviet Union, and they very much were born in a time when US wealth was limitless and US military power was without equal. Yet in order to protect that belief that nothing has changed, a much more systemic deception is being maintained; rather than pantries and attics, the US is raiding bonus funds for its sailors and soldiers and looting the money meant to maintain its ships and planes. All the while, the debts keep growing and the real budget (adjusted for inflation) keeps shrinking.
In Goodbye Lenin, maintaining the illusion that the DDR still exists becomes impossible in the end, and the ailing mother goes to her grave having realised that the state she lived her life in collapsed years ago. Whether Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden will share that fate is an open question. For now, the slash-and-burn inside the US Navy, Army and Air Force continues, as people such as Jake Sullivan work tirelessly to make sure their fragile elders don’t discover the truth.
Disclaimer
Some of the posts we share are controversial and we do not necessarily agree with them in the whole extend. Sometimes we agree with the content or part of it but we do not agree with the narration or language. Nevertheless we find them somehow interesting, valuable and/or informative or we share them, because we strongly believe in freedom of speech, free press and journalism. We strongly encourage you to have a critical approach to all the content, do your own research and analysis to build your own opinion.
We would be glad to have your feedback.
Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/