“We certainly understand and appreciate the urgency and are poised to move quickly,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.
The Pentagon is preparing to quickly approve a weapons package for Ukraine that includes urgently needed artillery and air defenses as Congress lines up votes to pass additional funding for the country, according to two U.S. officials.
The Biden administration has not made a final decision on how large the tranche would be and what will be in it, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to speak about sensitive internal deliberations. But Defense Department officials are working on putting together a package of U.S. equipment that can move quickly through the bureaucratic process once the legislation passes and is signed by the president, one of the officials said.
“They will have that recommendation to the secretary very quickly, and that gets to the president shortly thereafter,” the official said.
Is putting it on a plane something that would be considered money spent on Ukraine, and thus part of the package?
I can’t imagine they can just fly it around all willy nilly for no reason? Moneys gotta come from some sort of budget line item.
We have an unfathomable amount of explosive shit stocked away all over Europe as a result of the Cold War, most of this will likely be shipping crates by rail from Poland. If anything needs to be dropped somewhere quick fast and in a hurry, it would just be hours that the cargo pilots needed to fly to stay current anyways.
Ah great point on flying hours. May as well be doing something useful while staying current.
Exactly. A fact which should be pants-shittingly terrifying to Vlad and his ilk, we can casually drop a few tons of things that go bang on an ally’s doorstep with about as much planning and effort as it takes to coordinate a few NFL game flyovers…cause we were already in the air on a Monday anyway. If we recalled all the pilots from the golf courses and started delivering bombs pointy end first, it would be a very very bad day to be Russian.
Nothing is stopping the military moving arms to US bases in Germany or Poland. That’s just normal military operations.
A ton of US stuff is being shuttled aroun willy-nilly for no reason all the time. A lot of the Pentagon budget is unaccounted for. They even lost literal pallets of cash this one time.