Obviously, they didn’t get particularly satisfying or open answers, and, interestingly, some Democrats were also interested in protecting The People’s money and wondering just what’s going on
Lawmakers Question Pentagon on Ukraine Funds, Signaling Fresh Doubts
Republicans in Congress sharply questioned senior Pentagon officials on Tuesday about the tens of billions of dollars in military and other aid the United States has sent to Ukraine, casting doubt on whether they would embrace future spending as Democrats pleaded for a cleareyed assessment of how much more money would be needed.
The exchanges at committee hearings, coming just days after the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, highlighted how concerns about the high cost of sending weapons to Kyiv have intensified on Capitol Hill. The growing doubts have threatened what was once a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of the aid and could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to win congressional approval of funds to replenish its military assistance accounts. The funding inflection point could come as soon as this summer, months earlier than previously expected.
The hearings also illustrated how members of both parties, despite expressing confidence that a majority in Congress remains committed to supporting Ukraine, are concerned that a determined minority — including right-wing Republicans who eschew U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts and liberal antiwar Democrats — may weaken that resolve if the war continues to drag on.
Yes, God forbid that Congress and We The People are provided with a clear and detailed explanation of where are money has gone, and, really, Americans are losing faith in continuing to prop up a corrupt and authoritarian regime in a war that could lead to something affecting the entire world.
“How many more times do you think Congress needs to provide aid?” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, asked Colin H. Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, during his appearance before the Armed Services panel. “What do you think, at the end, is the end game?”
Good question. It didn’t solicit much of an answer
Pentagon leaders were reluctant to commit to either a figure or a timeline upon which they would be seeking additional funds, saying that the vagaries of the war made it impossible to commit to a schedule.
Where’s the money going? Especially since
Russia will emerge from the Ukraine war a ‘shattered military power,’ top Pentagon official says
Russia will emerge from its war in Ukraine a “shattered military power,” a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday, stressing that the country has yet to achieve any of its goals and is expected to continue to struggle on the battlefield.
Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, told US lawmakers that the situation looked “dire and pessimistic” for Ukraine when Russian forces first invaded in late February 2022, but after a year of fighting, it has become clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “lost” the war.
They like to make lots of pronouncements, but, not a lot of real answers. Or accountability.
The thing about war is that it is not a simple construction plan with an end already forecast and the ability to track cost and schedule overruns. Those are the questions you ask when your fast rail project is ten years overdue and billions in the red.
As far as I know, Joe Biden has stated that the policy of the USA WRT Ukraine is “whatever it takes, however long it takes”. It would be foolish to expect military commanders to plan for anything less. The only shortcuts to that process are if the Russians give up or the Russians win. Both depend mostly on the Russians, not “Pentagon officials”.
I suspect the goal of the USA policy makers WRT Ukraine is to damage the Russian military and reduce their global stature. The problem is, historically, when you damage someone’s military and humiliate them, they tend to fix the problems that you exploited. Russian corruption in their military was a significant factor in their inability to quickly achieve their objectives. battlefield humiliation, followed by a few hundred executions will clean that up pretty quickly. It is the sort of thing a military coming off of 20 years of peace can afford, not one with recent combat scars. This is something the USA will have to face also if we ever use our own military again for defending the nation, something we have not done since WW2.
No need to worry about them this year. Biden is in the White House. Anti-war Democrats only exist during Republican administrations.
Mr Teach:
Mr Teach forgot to include Nazi.
On the other hand, Repubicuns still have great faith in the corrupt and authoritarian Putin!
To quote Ronald Reagan, “There you go again!” The distinguished Mr Dowd wrote:
That’s been the persistent Democratic theme: if you aren’t wildly supportive of sending American money and American war materiel to Ukraine, you must be figuratively fellating Vladimir Putin. That some of us don’t think this war is really any of our business, that some of us are seriously concerned that fighting a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal doesn’t mean we somehow support Vladimir Putin is simply outside of their ability to grasp. Or at least outside of the Talking Points they received.
Now, now. Mr Teach claimed that Americans are losing faith in propping up a corrupt and authoritarian regime, ostensibly Ukraine.
We just turned his risible claim back on him. You were collateral damage. Our apologies.
The Ukrainians are defending their nation and people from an invasion from a proven corrupt and authoritarian regime. The West supports Ukraine.
Why does Mr Teach deride and disparage a nation and people fighting for their lives? Like you, Mr Teach could make the argument that it’s not worth US monies or the existential risk – which is always there anyway.
And be honest, although you may not revere the ‘strength and genius’ of Putin, many Repubicuns do for reasons hard to understand. Is it because ex-Prez Trump was a Putin/Russia supporter? Is it just because Democrats oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine? Is it because Trump tried and failed to coerce President Zelensky into investigating Biden? Is it because Hunter was paid big bucks by Burisma just because he is a Biden?
Our esteemed host quoted:
That’s a true enough statement, and it’s actually par for the course of Russian military history. People have been seduced by the idea of the great Red Army that pushed the Germans out of the Soviet Union, but that only happened after tremendous military defeats, tons of American aid, strategic blunders by the Nazis, and the economic pressure on the Third Reich caused by Allied bombing and raw materials problems. After D-Day, Germany was fighting a two-front war again.
Remember: the Russians lost the Russo=Japanese War of 1905, their part in World War I, and were badly mauled by the Finns in the 1940 Winter Waer, before the Soviets had to bring forth many more resources than originally thought.
But, over all of that looms the spectre of nuclear war. The more defeats the Russians suffer conventionally, the more pressure Vladimir Putin will feel to use tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons, and that changes everything. The NATO leaders will be defecating in their drawers if that happens, because once the nuclear threshold is crossed, only God knows when it would end/
Dana,
The probability of Putin using nukes is very low. I very much doubt he would use it in Ukraine for any purpose. The Russians, unlike the USA, have never used nukes against people in war. It would take a serious threat to the Russian homeland to cause him to consider it. Despite rhetoric by neo-con war advocates, Putin is not crazy or psychopathic. He won’t throw his country into nuclear war even if his own life is at stake. The one we should be worried about is the crazy guy in the White House. Biden has never been good with the truth and now that he is senile, he actually believes the stories he tells. Last week he was actually telling people about his civil rights warrior record while forgetting he voted against every civil rights law in the Senate and famously voted against bussing because he “didn’t want his kids going to school in a jungle”. He may order a first strike to teach Corn Pop a lesson he won’t forget or to show Germany “No one F*** a Biden”. For Putin to use a battlefield nuke, he would need to see evidence of NATO forces organizing in Poland or Lithuania in at least division strength. The lesson of Desert Storm is “don’t give the Americans 6 months to assemble their forces on your border”. It would be a desperation move to prevent an invasion, not an escalation move to improve his position in Ukraine. Zalenski has threatened to take the war into Red Square, if only America gives him enough resources.
It’s highly unlikely that Putin would use nukes and even less likely the US would.
That said, the probability is very low but never zero as long as the world has nukes.
NATO and the US will need to be responsible for President Zelensky’s actions, for example, taking “the war into Red Square”.
Anyway, the last time Russia was invaded was June 1941 by Nazi Germany. Since then, the USSR and Russia have invaded their neighbors repeatedly. Putin’s supposed fear that NATO will amass and invade is unfounded and just propaganda to justify Putin’s actions. It’s the NATO and non-NATO nations that have legitimate concerns. The West shouldn’t fall for Putin’s propaganda.
Dear Elwood:
Not wanting to spend money supporting Ukraine does not mean a person likes Putin.
Try to hold two separate thoughts in your mind at the same time.
The Western-thinking Mr Dowd wrote:
To a Western mind, what you wrote makes perfect sense. But the obvious question is: is this the way that the Russians think?
If Vladimir Vladimirovich thought like a Westerner, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine, and Georgia as well, right? Oh, wait, we Westerners have invaded other countries since World War II, haven’t we? We invaded Iraq, we invaded Afghanistan, we sent troops uninvited into Syria, just in this century. In the latter part of the 20th century, we supported an invasion of Cuba, we invaded Panama and Grenada and Cambodia, we sent troops into Vietnam and Korea and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We armed anti-Communist movements in Nicaragua and Angola and Namibia and Yemen.
All of our military actions had perfectly good and logical reasons behind them, at least from a Western perspective, but perhaps, just perhaps, to the Russians they don’t look that good.
The good Professor wrote:
And you base that assessment on what? A simple fact: no nation with a nuclear arsenal has ever lost a war on its borders, so we have zero historical evidence to support your statement. We do know that nations with nuclear arsenals have lost wars far from their borders — both the US and Soviets in Afghanistan, the US in Vietnam, the US in Korea — when they chose not to use the nuclear weapons they had.
Israel purportedly has nuclear weapons, but has never come close to losing a war with the Arabs, so they didn’t need to use what they supposedly have.
This is different: the
SovietsRussians have not fared nearly as well as they had hoped in Ukraine, and NATO are considering sending them enough weapons to actually defeat the Russians. If the Ukrainians manage to not just hold their own but actually start really winning, just what would a desperate Vladimir Putin do? We just don’t know.I wouldn’t expect any first use of nuclear weapons to be used against NATO cities or anything like that. But using ‘tactical’ or ‘battlefield’ nukes against troop concentrations, logistics bases, or war materiel supply routes could be considered tactically sound, and would have the NATO leaders defecating in their drawers. That’s the kind of thing which could make NATO leaders pause in giving Ukraine aid, and the people in NATO countries demand that their leaders stop the path to nuclear war.
Dana,
4 decades in DoD, most of which studying how to fight the USSR and Russians. Plus working with Russians in Bosnia.
Russia has had nukes for all of this decade and Western/NATO/ USA politicians did not at all give pause to opposing Russia in Ukraine. This is self-evident. It is also self-evident that we are in this position of nuclear powers in global confrontation with each other and our “people” are not demanding their leaders stop the path to nuclear war. The reason we are in this position is that no one believes the Russians or the USA will use nukes over Ukraine.
The Russians will use nukes if their home soil is threatened by a sizable ground force that they are unable to defeat on the ground. No other reason. If they see the ground force mobilizing, and have no other way of stopping it because they are so weakened by actions in Ukraine, they will hit it with nukes. There are no circumstances where Russia will launch ICBMs at Europe or the USA. There are plenty of other options though that are easier to do, more productive and less messy. We know they have people in our country who can be activated to stir up trouble. If you see labor unions and university professors calling for impeachment of Biden, that is a sign of such people being activated. Another option is to individually target the people who are most active in lobbying the USA to help Ukraine at any cost. “Any cost” usually means “any cost to the taxpayers” not “any cost to the wealthy elites”. When those elites come under attack with their bank accounts being mysteriously drained, Child porn being found on their work computers, and subtle threats to their family members, those are signs of Russia taking things seriously. And all that happens well below the level of news coverage. We aren’t even in the realm of things like assassinations and kidnappings yet. America elites play in this international chess game because they pay no personal price for their participation. Putin will present them with consequences. Nations don’t go to war against weach other. Kings do. Putin will take the war to our “kings”. No nukes required.
[…] that is what I have been saying all […]