Pentagon unlikely to use all of the billions Congress authorized it to spend on Ukraine weapons before Biden leaves office, officials say
By Oren Liebermann, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis and Alex Marquardt, CNN
(CNN) — The Pentagon is unlikely to use all of the billions of dollars authorized by Congress to arm Ukraine before President Joe Biden leaves office, according to two US officials and three defense officials.
The administration has less than two months left to use nearly $7 billion, part of a larger package authorized by Congress earlier this year to help Ukraine in the war with Russia. The funding allows the Defense Department to draw from its own stockpiles to send weapons, but shortages have limited how much the US can send to Kyiv in recent months.
For months, the US has run into the limits of its ability to replenish its own weapons inventories, which limited what the Biden administration has been able to send Ukraine. The US has been growing its capacity to produce critical munitions, such as 155mm artillery shells, since virtually the beginning of the war nearly three years ago, but the ramp up in production is not yet complete.
The Pentagon had pledged to use all of the remaining authority to provide the military aid as the situation has grown more urgent given the size of Russian attacks on Ukraine, including the recent first-time use of an intermediate-range ballistic missile with multiple warheads.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Last week, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the administration is “committed to using the full authority that Congress has allotted to us.”
State Department officials briefed Congress this month that the administration is still working to allocate the remaining funds, according to a congressional source familiar with the matter. But with only 55 days left until President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the US still has $6.8 billion left in authority to ship weapons directly from US inventories to Ukraine.
Trump is unlikely to continue providing the same level support to Kyiv, and CNN reported Wednesday that his pick to be national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is weighing several proposals to end a war that the president-elect claimed on the campaign trail he could end in one day.
In the time the administration has left, one defense official said the size of the individual military aid packages is likely to increase but acknowledged using the remaining funds within such a short time is “going to be a challenge.”
US official says Ukraine should lower recruiting age to 18
Earlier Wednesday, a senior Biden administration official said Ukraine should lower the recruiting age for its military to 18 years old from where it currently stands at 25, calling the need “critical.”
The official argued that the most urgent need is not weapons but fresh manpower to train so that current troops can be rotated out and those who have been killed can be replaced.
“As you look at the battlefront and the needs, the progress that the Russians have made, particularly in the east, the physics of it, the pure math of it is you need bodies,” said the official. “You need manpower. You need soldiers.”
The US has been able to authorize military aid packages totaling approximately $750 million per month recently, according to one US official. This fall, DoD increased the size of the military aid packages at the request of Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the official said.
“We’re basically trying to do everything we can to leave everything on the table and put Ukraine in the strongest position,” the official said.
Now, the administration is working to increase that amount to about $1 billion per month in the time remaining, a second US official said, but that will still leave billions unused.
Both officials said there are still large quantities of weapons and equipment that will arrive in Ukraine before the start of the Trump administration on January 20, including hundreds of air defense missiles. Then it will be up to the new administration to decide whether to continue to flow weapons to Kyiv or use the remaining authority to send new military aid packages.
In September, Biden committed billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine as President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House. But the US was not able to send all of the aid at once, instead breaking it down into smaller packages announced approximately every two weeks.
“As part of the surge in security assistance that President Biden announced on September 26, the Department remains committed to providing Ukraine with the capabilities it needs to fight Russian aggression through the end of the Administration,” a defense official told CNN.
The Biden administration has continued to announce military aid packages twice a month, but the US is still far short of the pace required to use the remaining money. In the previous two months, the US announced a total of $1.9 billion in Ukraine assistance across five different aid packages, a number that would have to triple to use what’s left to give from the Biden administration. The last package, announced on November 20, was worth $275 million and included much-needed artillery rounds and drones.
Biden led a concerted effort to convince some skeptical Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, to pass a supplemental funding bill in April that included $61 billion in aid for Ukraine.
“It’s going to make America safer. It’s going to make the world safer. And it continues America’s leadership in the world,” Biden said upon signing the bill on April 24. The US announced a $1 billion military aid package for Ukraine that same day.
But the value of aid packages quickly dipped, as the stockpiles of weapons and equipment the Pentagon was able to send Kyiv dwindled.
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