The Pentagon announced Friday, July 8 a new drawdown of weapons and military equipment.
This is the fifteenth drawdown from the US inventories since August 2021, noted in the statement.
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The new batch of assistance is worth 400 mln USD and includes:
- 4 more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and more rockets to them;
- 3 tactical vehicles;
- rounds of 155mm artillery munitions;
- demolition munitions – which is likely referring to high-explosive materials for making breaches, ambushes or blowing up bridges;
- counter-battery systems;
- spare parts and other equipment.
Apart from HIMARS, the number of which will soon grow up to 12 with this package, the interesting part is the artillery rounds. A senior defense official told Politico that the upcoming package would include 1,000 artillery rounds of a new type, the precision-guided ones.
The official said, those are similar to the GPS-guided M982 Excalibur rounds to the M777 howitzers, but did not confirm whether or not it’s exactly Excalibur that is going to Ukraine.
Defense Express, on its part, notes that it’s quite unusual both to send such a quantity of rounds and to be unspecific about these quantities.
For comparison, in the previous $820 mln package announced July 1, there was up to 150,000 artillery rounds mentioned in the official statement. There were also other major openly announced quantities – 40,000 and 36,000 rounds in the 14th and 13th drawdowns respectively.
Nevertheless, these 1,000 new-type rounds will be enough, says the official, they would even help to "save ammunition":
"It offers Ukraine precise capability for specific targets, it will save ammunition, it will be more effective due to the precision, so it’s a further evolution in our support for Ukraine in this battle in the Donbas. This kind of ammunition will not be used at a rate of [thousands] a day."
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