Andre Damon
The Defense Department announced Wednesday that the United States and its allies are planning to “expand their nations’ industrial base” for building bombs, rockets and artillery for the war with Russia in Ukraine.
In the name of “providing long-term support to Ukraine,” the world’s leading imperialist powers are massively escalating their wartime production of “ground-based long range fires, air defense systems, air-to-ground munitions.”
The New York Times called the announcement a “Turning Point for Allies Arming Ukraine” and a “sign that the United States and its allies believe that the fighting in Ukraine will last years.”
That same day, Washington announced plans to more than double the number of long-range HIMARS missile launchers sent to Ukraine. According to the Pentagon, the US will spend another $1.1 billion on arms shipments to the country.
These moves come as Russia has declared that it would recognize the independence of four Ukrainian territories partially under its control, in what is expected to be the prelude to their formal annexation on Friday.
On Monday, a series of attacks took place on the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines, which have the capability of transferring natural gas from Russia to Germany. Ending the Nord Stream II pipeline project was a major goal of the United States in seeking to provoke a war with Russia.
Although no state has taken responsibility for the attacks, Radosław Sikorski, the former Foreign Minister of Poland and husband of US state operative Anne Applebaum, tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” before subsequently deleting the tweet.
These developments follow a major military debacle for Russian forces in northeastern Ukraine earlier this month, in which Ukrainian US-NATO proxy forces advanced dozens of miles in a matter of days. In the wake of the collapse of Russian defenses in the Kharkiv region, the Kremlin threatened to use nuclear weapons in the war, while US officials declared that they would not be “deterred” from escalating their involvement in the war by the threat of nuclear annihilation.
The lightning advance by Ukraine was made possible by the fact that the United States had provided its most sophisticated ground-based missile and anti-aircraft systems to Ukrainian troops and had proposed, organized and led the offensive.
The United States, having transformed the Ukrainian army into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Pentagon, has effectively emptied its armories of all available weapons to send to the country.
The weapons shipment announced by the Pentagon on Wednesday will be the first in which the United States is not drawing down existing inventories of weapons but rather directly commissioning defense contractors to build weapons potentially years in the future, the Pentagon said.
“Unlike Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which DoD has continued to leverage to deliver equipment to Ukraine from DoD stocks at a historic pace, USAI is an authority under which the United States procures capabilities from industry,” the Pentagon said. “This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine in the mid- and long-term.”
The Pentagon noted, “In total, the United States has now committed approximately $16.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021. Since 2014, the United States has committed approximately $19 billion in security assistance to Ukraine more than $16.2 billion since the beginning of Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion on February 24.”
The US has, for example, sent more than 1.5 million 155mm howitzer shells to Ukraine, while it only produces 30,000 shells per year in peacetime.
“The military stocks of most [European NATO] member states have been, I wouldn’t say exhausted but depleted in a high proportion, because we have been providing a lot of capacity to the Ukrainians,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, said earlier this month.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared, “We are now working with industry to increase production of weapons and ammunition, somehow as a whole to increase production.”
“The United States needs to maintain stockpiles to support war plans,” Mark Cancian, a former US Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told CNBC. “For some munitions, the driving war plan would be a conflict with China over Taiwan or in the South China Sea,” he said.
Alongside its rearmament plan, the United States has this week announced plans to reorganize how it commands, arms and equips its proxy forces in Ukraine, creating a unified command structure to organize the war effort.
So far, the Pentagon has not admitted to the creation of the new command structure in order to, according to the New York Times, “avoid feeding into the narrative of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that his country is at war with the United States.”
The Times reports that “The system would be placed under a single new command based in Germany that would be led by a high-ranking U.S. general, according to several military and administration officials.”
The newspaper added, “The new command, which would report to General Cavoli, would carry out the decisions made by the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of 40 countries that the Defense Department created after the Russian invasion to address Ukraine's needs and requests.
“About 300 people would be dedicated to the mission, which would be in Wiesbaden, Germany, the U.S. Army’s headquarters in Europe. Much of the training of Ukrainian soldiers on U.S. weapons systems is already taking place there or nearby,” the New York Times reported.
Amid the escalation of the war, the US Embassy in Moscow has urged its citizens to leave Russia, declaring, “U.S. citizens should not travel to Russia, and those residing or traveling in Russia should depart Russia immediately while limited commercial travel options remain.”
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