Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, center, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, center right, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, second from right, meet in Kyiv, Ukraine, April 24, 2022.
The White House has asked for another round of funding for Ukraine as it defends itself against the Russian invasion. This time, President Biden wants $33 billion, on top of a $13.6 billion initial request that was approved last month. This also does not include a bill that passed Congress yesterday to reconstitute the WWII-era Lend-Lease program to lend Ukraine equipment for the war effort. There’s no price tag on the potential cost of that to the U.S.
The new $33 billion package includes approximately $20.4 billion in military assistance, from long-range artillery, high-tech drones, and anti-tank weapons, to the deployment of U.S. troops and equipment to regional NATO allies, and to cybersecurity and intelligence support. There’s also $11.5 billion in economic and humanitarian aid for the battered country.
Setting aside the humanitarian support, if this package is advanced—and there’s every reason to believe it will be—that’s about $35 billion in direct military support for the war, and an untold number of billions in indirect support through the Lend-Lease program. For context, the estimated annual cost of fighting the now-ended war in Afghanistan was about $41 billion per year. The annual defense budget of Russia is $65.9 billion, and the U.S. contribution to Ukraine represents only our share, even as separate European donations continue to flow.
There’s certainly a viewpoint that this is a worthwhile price to pay to uphold democratic values and resist the aims of an authoritarian aggressor. That point has been made on this site, even as I would rather see more effort put toward a diplomatic settlement for peace. But whatever your views, I hope one point could be shared by liberals and progressives on both sides of that question: Why should we spend additional money to achieve these goals in Ukraine, after breaking the bank year after year on our own military spending?
In other words, if you want to offer another $20.4 billion for military purposes for the Ukraine war, why not dip into the existing $776 billion military budget for this fiscal year? That would still leave 97.4 percent of our Pentagon budget untouched, at a time when the U.S. military is waging no other (formal) wars anywhere on the planet.
It is frustrating enough that $46.6 billion, including humanitarian aid but not including Lend-Lease costs, is about to be spent dealing with the Ukraine situation at a time when Congress cannot see its way clear to spend approximately that on an annual basis to deal with a devastating and potentially irreversible change in global climate. Virtually every individual piece of the failed Build Back Better agenda—universal child care and pre-K, increased Affordable Care Act subsidies, elder care boosts, housing investments, and so on—is cheaper on an annual basis than the costs of this conflict.
Moreover, the major purported reason given not to move forward with those long-term investments is that we cannot risk higher inflation. Inflation is invoked whenever anyone wants to make sure someone is educated or has the health care they need, but never when fiscal spending goes directly into the gaping mouths of military contractors.
We should get in the habit of using the existing, astounding military budget when situations like this occur.
All of that, some would rebut, is a moot point when a war that wasn’t of our choosing breaks out and we must summon our resources to support democracy. But isn’t that what our impossibly bloated military budget is for? Why must additional appropriations be made for this purpose, when the U.S. military has grain silos full of cash and not a whole lot to do with it?
Keep in mind that one key mechanism for getting this military aid to Ukraine goes through a Department of Defense program called the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI). To me, that sounds like the agency doing the supplying could pay for it, especially when it’s the most gold-plated agency in our government.
The second major mechanism for delivering support is the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA). That enables the president to authorize immediate transfers of equipment from U.S. stocks without specific congressional approval for each item. In other words, the president gets to take existing items from the military stockpile and send them to Ukraine. The military presumably then would want to replenish those stocks, but wouldn’t the $776 billion granted them by Congress, with probably more than that on the way next fiscal year, come in extremely handy for that purpose?
The final mechanism, for which the White House wants $4 billion, is the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program. This is a fraction of the total military spending the White House is seeking. But while the State Department directs what countries receive the financing, the Defense Department executes it. So the Pentagon has a hand in essentially all of the resources flowing to Ukraine to prosecute the war. That offers a good avenue for how to fund it.
That we need to locate new funding for the $2.6 billion dedicated to funding additional U.S. troop deployments to Europe is indicative of the preposterousness of how we handle military spending. The hundreds of billions annually that makes the U.S. monumentally dominant in terms of military wealth is just the base budget; if anything else has to happen, the Pentagon comes hat in hand looking for more.
That’s absurd. If the military cannot get by on $776 billion to accommodate moving a relative handful of troops into NATO countries in Eastern Europe, then we should be auditing just what it’s doing with a sum equivalent to the gross national product of Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon budget keeps increasing because the slightest tremor in the world triggers calls for emergency supplemental requests. We should get in the habit of using the existing, astounding military budget when situations like this occur.
At this website, Robert Kuttner has said that the Russian conflict is really a proxy war with NATO. OK, let the U.S. military pay for it then. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has stated unequivocally that his goal is the weakening of Russia’s military capacity. That sounds like something within the Pentagon’s mission, and by extension its budget. In remarks last Thursday, President Biden said, “The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly.” But the cost of this fight has been borne, year after year, in astronomical payments to the U.S. military for the purposes of our security. If this is part of a longer struggle against the Russian state, it should be factored into our annual military expenditures, not layered on top of it.
I will heartily laugh at any attempt to respond to this exceedingly modest proposal by bemoaning the shortchanging of the U.S. military. But if the Pentagonians think they cannot handle the expense of whatever it is they do with $776 billion per year while also using a tiny portion of that in Ukraine, they could maybe fix their horrific procurement policies that enable endless military contractor price-gouging. It would not be difficult for the Pentagon to find the proverbial change in the couch cushions to honor the president’s funding request, if they knew what they were spending their money on in the first place.
Reasonable people can agree with or question whether the U.S. should maintain its posture as the arsenal of democracy. I am not addressing that debate here. I am simply saying that we already paid for that arsenal, and we should not succumb to typical Pentagon accounting to have to pay for it again and again.
