Pentagon can give $5 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, but there is not enough money to replace them yet
Mike McCord, who is responsible for the financial reporting in the US Department of Defense, has said that the Pentagon has US$5 billion worth of weapons for Ukraine by the end of the year but only US$1.6 billion to replace them.
Source: McCord said this in an interview with Bloomberg, European Pravda reports
Details: The weapons that the Pentagon transfers to Ukraine are usually taken from warehouses, and the department's funds go to contracts with defence companies to replace them.
As the representative of the Pentagon explained, without the approval of additional funding in the US Congress, the American Department of Defense only has US$1.6 billion at its disposal for concluding replacement contracts.
"You want to be refilling the hole and sending that consistent demand signal of funding and contracts to industry to keep those lights going, and that is what we have already had to slow down because we have seen there’s a real prospect of a shutdown," McCord told Bloomberg.
If, by the end of Saturday, Congress does not approve and the US president does not sign long-term or temporary federal government funding bills, the government will switch to a shutdown mode.
In August, the White House proposed that Congress approve US$40 billion in additional funding by the end of the year, US$24 billion of which would go to aid Ukraine and related needs. But this was opposed by the right wing of the Republicans in the US House of Representatives.
Against this background, the US Senate agreed to an alternative project of the short-term budget resolution, which, among other things, provides more than US$6.1 billion for additional aid to Ukraine, including US$4.5 billion for defence spending and more than US$1.6 billion for economic support.
But Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has already said that there will be no votes among the members of the House to support the Senate's budget proposal.
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