The United States has moved to speed up its weapon acquisition programs in order to compensate for the vast quantities of armaments shipped to Ukraine in recent months.
Douglas Bush, assistant army secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, told media that this acceleration of the contracting processes involved is based on performing certain processes simultaneously that were formerly run in succession.
Last week, one media outlet reported that the Pentagon spend over $2.6 billion between May and October on replenishing the United States’ stocks of weapons and equipment that had been sent to Ukraine.
With the Pentagon awarding around $1 billion worth of contracts, primarily for rockets and ammunition, since the second half of October, Bush reportedly remarked the speed of this contracting exceeds the Pentagon’s internal benchmarks by 15 percent.
Having supplied a considerable amount of weaponry to Ukraine since the 2014 Euromaidan coup, the United States ramped up weapon shipments to the Eastern European country after the launch of the Russian military operation.
This military aid endeavor, however, has been marred by reports of US weaponry bound for Ukraine ending up “vanishing”, with its ultimate fate remaining unclear. This became a cause for concern in the United States but seemingly did not deter the White House from spending more money on the issue.