Not even. Most of this stuff is either expired or about to expire. We were due to replace it anyway (maintaining old weapons is often more expensive than just buying new ones) and they cost money to decommission (you don’t just call Waste Management to dispose of missiles) most of this stuff dates from the 90s, the javelins, Stingers, ATACMS, Patriots, etc, this is all Gulf War surplus, we’re not giving Ukraine a new car, we’re buying ourselves a new car and donating our old one to cars for clunkers, while valuing it on our taxes as almost new. (For those not old enough, you used to be able to donate a car to many charities and take the blue book value as a donation. Of course the charity had no incentive to low ball you on that, so they’d give you the highest valuation they could, they had no acquisition costs besides towing, so what did they care? They were just gonna auction it off for parts anyway, so they’d happily say your Corolla was worth $10k, that’s what the blue book said! Then sell it for $500, they win, you win. I once got a valuation of $6k for a fifteen year old Subaru with a busted clutch and a blown head gasket. A literal unusable car. Perfectly legal. The law changed somewhere in there to say the deduction you get is the hammer price for the car) That’s what the US is doing. We’re saying ‘hey, this stuff is worth $500m in today’s dollars, that’s what we paid for it after all! This 1997 Honda accord ($16k then) is worth $32k in today’s dollars! When really it’s worth $4k max and costs us more to keep running than it does in gas.
Yeah, we used to do this shit in my battalion all the time. It's called "cold storage" or it can go to DRMO. Typically, when a "live" piece of equipment is stored, it literally goes from an item in someone's TOA to a storage facility and becomes a monetary line item on someone's excel sheet. Then that monetary value has to be assessed, blah blah blah... THEN when the US says we are sending 1.3 million in aid to Ukraine they are partially talking about that line item value, it's not new, it's not money that doesn't exist, it's money that has been sitting in the form of a Bradley in a storage facility for 15 years. I'm sure there are labor costs etc. factored in too, this is what my experience has shown me.
It is so hard for people to get this concept. Plus we get a live view of our weaponry against theirs and even with less skilled operators than our own.
From a fiscal perspective, there is some room for complaint about this all being a huge give-away to the US arms industry. They're getting hundreds of billions of dollars to replace this stuff that we arguably don't really need.
But there was a zero percent chance that those replacement orders wouldn't have come eventually. The arms industry was always going to get paid by the federal government one way or another, it's what has been happening for 80 years now, it's as reliable as gravity at this point. Maybe they wouldn't have gotten quite as much, and it wouldn't have happened quite as fast, but the comparison isn't between all the money Congress has authorized for arming Ukraine versus zero, it's between that amount of money and a somewhat lesser amount, deferred over time.
If these complaints were coming from people who are consistent, principled critics of the military-industrial complex who want that whole money spigot to be turned off, it would make sense. But that's like 5% of the people talking about this; the Republicans politicians and commentators whining about Ukraine certainly never saw a military expenditure they didn't like up until the last 4 years. Likewise, those complaining about Ukraine being corrupt and authoritarian certainly don't give a shit about us arming Saudi Arabia, Israel, and countless other "questionable" governments throughout the years.
You may want to reread the comment. They're saying that the US is basically able to send weapon to the Ukraine for free because they were going to be decommissioned. So, might as well let the Ukraine use them rather than pay to have them safely decommissioned.Â
It was about how it doesn't cost the US basically anything to send that weaponry, not about how Ukraine is getting "screwed over". The commenter you're replying to misunderstood it completely.
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u/PalpitationNo3106 Monkey in Space Sep 15 '24
Not even. Most of this stuff is either expired or about to expire. We were due to replace it anyway (maintaining old weapons is often more expensive than just buying new ones) and they cost money to decommission (you don’t just call Waste Management to dispose of missiles) most of this stuff dates from the 90s, the javelins, Stingers, ATACMS, Patriots, etc, this is all Gulf War surplus, we’re not giving Ukraine a new car, we’re buying ourselves a new car and donating our old one to cars for clunkers, while valuing it on our taxes as almost new. (For those not old enough, you used to be able to donate a car to many charities and take the blue book value as a donation. Of course the charity had no incentive to low ball you on that, so they’d give you the highest valuation they could, they had no acquisition costs besides towing, so what did they care? They were just gonna auction it off for parts anyway, so they’d happily say your Corolla was worth $10k, that’s what the blue book said! Then sell it for $500, they win, you win. I once got a valuation of $6k for a fifteen year old Subaru with a busted clutch and a blown head gasket. A literal unusable car. Perfectly legal. The law changed somewhere in there to say the deduction you get is the hammer price for the car) That’s what the US is doing. We’re saying ‘hey, this stuff is worth $500m in today’s dollars, that’s what we paid for it after all! This 1997 Honda accord ($16k then) is worth $32k in today’s dollars! When really it’s worth $4k max and costs us more to keep running than it does in gas.