US pays top dollar to replace Ukraine’s used weapons; Israel dials in air strikes

(Originally published Sept. 20 in “What in the World“) Israel followed up its wave of pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah with old-fashioned air strikes.

Israeli fighter jets on Thursday struck targets of the Iran-backed militant group in southern Lebanon after detonating explosive booby-traps planted by its spy agency, Mossad, in communications equipment Hezbollah bought to avoid Israeli surveillance. So far, the two days of device attacks have killed 37 people.

The attacks are intended as retaliation for a wave of rocket attacks by Hezbollah into northern Israel that has forced residents there to flee. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks are meant to support Hamas in Gaza, but have sparked a cycle of tit-for-tat reprisals across the border. Washington has tried in vain to tamp down the conflict, which it fears will provoke war with Iran, which has been vowing retaliation since July when Israel assassinated Hamas’ political leader while he was in Tehran.

Giving Ukraine its old hand-me-downs continues to allow the Pentagon to splurge on new toys.

In the latest example, the U.S. Army is paying $440 million to buy 200 new Bradley fighting vehicles to replace the older models now fighting Russia. Regular readers will recall that much of U.S. military aid to Ukraine is provided under the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the U.S. President to basically hand a foreign country U.S. weapons from the Pentagon’s own stockpile. All he has to do is inform Congress that he’s doing it—no pesky approvals required. Pres. Joe Biden has so far used the PDA 44 times since Russia’s invasion to supply U.S. arms to Ukraine. Congress gets to determine the cap for the PDA, which—despite partisan bickering in public over Ukraine in approving the military’s budget—it has boosted from $100 million to $11 billion.

Even then, the Pentagon gave Ukraine so many weapons, it worried it was starting to run up against the limit. Then in May last year the Pentagon’s accountants realized the niftiest part of the PDA: the Congressional limit is for the book value of the arms given to Ukraine, not their replacement cost.

That gave them latitude to depreciate the value of used weaponry, which left a lot more room to keep shoveling weapons to Kyiv. Best of all, they could then go out and pay defense contractors the full price for the latest, greatest version of the same thing. So, giving Ukraine $11 billion in weapons means the Pentagon has basically a blank check to spend whatever it costs to replace them with new items. Even better, there’s no deadline for doing so.

In the big scheme of things, the PDA is chump change when you compare it to the $877 billion that Congress hands the Pentagon to spend every year. But given that a new car typically loses half its book value the second it drives off the lot, how far that $11 billion goes depends on how aggressively the Defense Dept.’s accountants are willing to mark down the book value of used weapons.

The only real limit, then, is how fast defense contractors can churn out new arms to replace those the U.S. ships to Ukraine.