The U.S. is about to pass next year’s budget for fending off threats from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Islamic extremists.
(Originally published Dec. 13 in “What in the World“) The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the nation’s record, $858 billion national defense budget for next year. The bill enumerating America’s annual military outlays now goes to the Democrat-controlled Senate. That works out to almost $2,600 for every American citizen. For one year.
Top priority is replenishing the Pentagon’s own rapidly depleting arsenal. The U.S. has so far provided Ukraine with $19.3 billion in military aid. The Pentagon will this week start shipping another $275 million in weapons to Ukraine under the Presidential drawdown authority, which allows the Pentagon to ship Ukraine stuff it has already bought.
Among that weaponry is the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars. Ukraine has just used its Himars to kill dozens of Russian military personnel in hotel in occupied Melitopol. The U.S. still refuses to provide Ukraine with the kind of longer-range weapons it has asked for, including the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System for its Himars, the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone or the larger MQ-9 Reaper drone. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also reiterated his request for Patriot anti-missile defense batteries to defend against Russian missiles, but Washington has so far declined. Patriot batteries are typically operated by U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization personnel. Patriots could also be used to hit targets inside Russia, which Ukraine is now using homemade drones to accomplish.
Russia faces a worsening weapons shortage itself and has resorted to using missiles and drones from Iran as well as artillery from North Korea. While it’s managing somehow to build new cruise missiles in defiance of Western sanctions, Russia is also reportedly now firing Ukraine’s own old cruise missiles against it. Ukraine handed over the cruise missiles in the 1990s as part of an agreement—which now rings especially hollow—to surrender its nuclear weapons arsenal in return for security guarantees from Russia and the West. Russian forces have apparently been lobbing those cruise missiles, relieved of their nuclear payloads, back at Ukraine.
The list of military threats to America, freedom and democracy continues to grow, meanwhile. With fronts now established against Russia in Eastern Europe, China in the Pacific, Iran and Syria in the Gulf, and North Korea in the Sea of Japan, the U.S. is putting troops in Niger to fight Islamic extremists in West Africa.