Lasers and balloons are the weapons of the day as Ukraine exposes a growing shortage of conventional armaments
(Originally published Feb. 14 in “What in the World“) Defense ministers from the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are due to meet today in Brussels to discuss accelerating military aid to Ukraine as it fends off a fresh Russian offensive.
The NATO war chiefs are also due to discuss beefing up their own military budgets and shoring up the alliance’s eastern flank against possible Russian escalation as the war in Ukraine exposes a growing shortage of artillery and of battle-ready tanks.
The U.S. has now promised to send Ukraine M1 Abrams battle tanks, but cautioned that they won’t arrive for several months. They’ll join the hundreds of Leopard 2 and older Leopard 1 tanks now promised Ukraine by Germany and the countries it sells them to, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Poland.
That leaves only attack drones, fighter jets and long-range Atacms missile as the only military hardware U.S. President Joe Biden still won’t send Ukraine after relenting on tanks and Patriot anti-missile batters, precision-guided Himars missile launchers and howitzers. But the U.K. and some European nations are already said to be considering sending Typhoon fighter jets to Ukraine, which could force Biden to offer F-16s or risk being out-proxied in Ukraine.
Europe’s offers of tanks, however, has exposed just how few battle-ready tanks it has to defend itself. Likewise, the U.S. now says the reason it won’t give Ukraine Atacms, or MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems, isn’t because it’s afraid Ukraine might use them to launch attacks inside Russia and provoke World War III, but because the U.S. is worried it doesn’t have enough Atacms of its own to spare.
NATO’s largesse to Ukraine has accelerated the weaker Russia’s invasion forces there appear. The stalemate seems to have bolstered confidence in Washington and European capitals that Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t make good on his threat at the outset of the invasion to launch a nuclear holocaust if NATO intervened on Ukraine’s behalf. After a year of tip-toeing around fears of nuclear annihilation, however, World War III may still be in the offing: on Monday, Dutch F-35s based in fellow NATO member Poland intercepted a Russian reconnaissance plane and its two fighter escorts over Polish airspace and escorted them back to the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. There have been fears since the outset of the Ukraine invasion that Russia might stage a lightning attack across the Suwalki gap—the narrow border area between Poland and Lithuania separating Kaliningrad from Russian ally Belarus.
Speaking of violating airspace, the U.S. and China, continue to bicker over balloons. U.S. officials now say they began tracking the spy balloon shot down over the Atlantic almost right after its launch in late-January from Hainan island as part of a wider hot-air espionage program that has seen China’s balloons voyage as widely as Hawaii and the Middle East. U.S. authorities then apparently allowed the balloon to pass over Alaska and Canada until it was spotted by civilians over Montana, then allowed it to continue across the United States until downing it once it had crossed South Carolina into open ocean.
Washington rejected a new claim by China that the U.S. has sent at least 10 spy balloons over the last year into China’s airspace. It still avers that its own balloon was a civilian meteorological balloon gone astray, however.
While the U.S. claims to have been tracking the enormous Chinese spy balloon halfway around the planet, the U.S. military responded to the hubbub over its admission that previous balloons had entered U.S. airspace undetected by ratcheting up its radar sensitivities. That may explain the detection over the weekend of three smaller UFOs that were taken down by U.S. fighter jets using Sidewinder missiles, one over Alaska, a second over the Yukon and a third over Lake Huron. The White House has still offered no explanation for what those objects were.
China, meanwhile, has deployed a military-grade laser to help blockade an atoll in the South China Sea and prevent the Philippine coast guard from resupplying an outpost there. Both nations claim the Second Thomas Shoal and in 1999, Manila intentionally ran an older ship aground there to create a Philippine outpost there. Last week, the Philippines says a Chinese coast guard vessel coordinating several maritime militia vessels used the bright green laser to temporarily blind crew members trying to resupply that outpost.
The Philippines may get some help soon from U.S. forces. While the U.S. Navy already enforces “freedom of navigation” voyages through the South China Sea in defiance of China’s claims to the entire body of water, Manila agreed earlier this month to give the U.S. Navy greater access to four of its own bases.