No. of Recommendations: 2
I don't want them to continue to pay the bill indefinitely. What I want is for Russia to do the just and proper thing and withdraw to their pre-war border, since they engaged in an unprovoked and unjustified and (dare I say) evil attack on an innocent neighbor.They're not going to do that. Putin wants to keep his perch and his head, and as such won't unilaterally withdraw. He's sunk too much into it.
So knowing that, and knowing that the battlefield situation is essentially a costly stalemate, the best (as in, least shitty) option is to start negotiations.
They're not aiming to be ready as a standalone military force. That's the point. They're part of a multinational defense coalition, and their contribution to that defense coalition doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) allocated in the same way as you would expect if they were fielding a national defense on their own. You don't need every nation in Europe to have the same number of armored divisions as they would field if they were all stand-alone countries - because then you're wasting resources.
If the plan is to have them just supply manpower, then where does the heavy equipment come from? The Ukraine war is teaching the world that cheap drones buy you a lot but also that artillery is still the great equalizer. We need shell production to ramp up rapidly.
Fortunately one decent thing that Joe Biden did was to direct the Army to do just that:
defensenews.com - Army races to widen the bottlenecks of artillery shell production“There’s going to be a lot of ribbon cuttings between now and the end of the year,” Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.
The Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to increase the capacity of 155mm munition production as it races to replenish stock sent to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, which began in early 2022, and to ensure the U.S. has what it might need should conflict erupt across multiple theaters at once. The Army planned to spend $3.1 billion in FY24 supplemental funding alone to ramp up production.
Prior to the war in Ukraine, the U.S. could build about 14,400 of the artillery shells per month. But as Ukrainian forces burn through the ammunition for howitzers sent to the country, the U.S. recognized quickly that replenishment could not be done with the current infrastructure.
The service has set a target of producing 100,000 artillery shells per month, but Army officials have shared it has fallen slightly behind schedule. Even so, the Army is now producing 40,000 shells a month, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at the Defense News Conference last month, adding that the plan is to reach 55,000 shells a month by the end of the year.
