Washington is confident they will have time to deliver all the funded aid to Ukraine by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, 2025. To make it happen, a special new strategy has been developed that aims to launch a whole "avalanche" of defense supplies and introduce new massive sanctions against russia, The Guardian reports, citing U.S. President's national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Sullivan didn't specify the amount of aid, only mentioned abstract figures: "hundreds of thousands of additional artillery rounds, thousands of rockets and hundreds of armored vehicles." All this equipment must be delivered by mid-January, or roughly in 45 days.
Defense Express notes that such a commitment would require Washington to ship $135.55 million worth of weapons daily, without weekends or holidays, to Ukraine under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) program — it's where the weapons are drawn directly from the U.S. Department of Defense's inventory.
After all, the total amount of money remaining in the account of this program only is about $6.1 billion: on November 13, the balance announced was $7.1 billion, and two aid packages were allocated since then, one amounting to $275 million pledged on November 20 and another worth $725 million on December 2. Also, an additional $2.2 billion is left under the USAI program where weapons are commissioned from American manufacturers.
Worth noting, these $6.1 billion for PDA consist of funds allocated by Congress for 2024 and $2.8 billion returned after an accounting error was discovered in summer 2023. There is a chance that this mistake was simply discarded or forgotten, then the Pentagon would only need to exploit some $3.3 billion in the remaining budget funds, presenting a bit more realistic prospect of sending the corresponding amount of weapons.
However, the main question is, what kind of weapons the U.S. can provide. In the end, it's not just the money that dictates the pace of supplies but also the availability of equipment and the minimum required level of defense capability that the U.S. Department of Defense wants to preserve and will never let the stocks fall below this benchmark. The stance of the Pentagon in this matter is more important than the fact it still keeps calculating Ukraine aid wrong, losing billions of dollars in the process.
If the U.S. Defense Department continues to stand by this approach, the only way to send the promised "avalanche of weapons" to Ukraine in 45 days would be to transfer what is already planned for decommissioning, or was recently decommissioned. The problem is, these weapons and military equipment would require repair and restoration to be any useful. Provided that the refurbishment is done in the U.S., it would take months, meaning they would have time to do nothing in these 45 days.
Final option is to transfer the defunct equipment as is and then restore it in Ukraine. This is where those 2.2 billion dollars under the USAI program may come in handy by being used to finance the work of American defense contractors in Ukraine. For a reminder, in early November this year, they were granted permission to carry out such work. Let us emphasize that this is only an assumption, perhaps even overly optimistic, but there are simply no other options visible in the current paradigm.
