The White House released a press ‘fact sheet’ Wednesday indicating that “the Department of Defense and industry partners” had “provided Ukraine with technical data to start local production of some of the FrankenSAM projects that seek to enable Ukraine’s legacy air defense systems by integrating certain Western munitions.”
“Parallel production of these systems in Ukraine and the United States will allow for faster fielding and enable Ukraine to contribute significantly to the sustainment of its air defense system,” the statement said.
“These initial deliverables,” combined with other US assistance, “will not only expand US-Ukraine cooperation and provide Ukraine with the capabilities it needs to be successful on the battlefield in the short term, but will support Ukraine’s long-term economic recovery and defense,” the White House assured.
The FrankenSAM program,
revealed to media in October, is designed to kill two birds with one stone, compensating for losses taken by Ukraine’s NATO-sourced air defense systems to Russian missile and drone strikes, and presenting the Pentagon with a chance for some penny-pinching as resources allocated to Kiev run dry amid wrangling in Washington over US President Joe Biden’s request for over
$60 billion in additional aid.When fused with Ukraine’s stocks of old Soviet-era launchers and radars, FrankenSAMs promise to provide Kiev with a vintage air defense army, but will have difficulty fighting off modern Russian strike systems.
But in a situation where additional US funds for Ukraine remain stalled in Congress, and where NATO is forced to organize a global scavenger hunt to slap together new weapons and ammo assistance packages for Kiev, the FrankenSAM project makes sense, retired Russian colonel and veteran military expert Andrei Koshkin told Sputnik.
The systems’ effectiveness is another story, the observer said, noting that like the Abrams tanks that the US so “proudly delivered” earlier this fall, FrankenSAMs will face the same fate-speedy destruction, if and when they’re deployed on the frontlines. “They will not result in any shift in the balance of forces on the front in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ favor,” Koshkin stressed.
The Ukrainian battlespace is already familiar with the use of Frankenstein weaponry, the observer pointed out, with anti-Kiev militias in the Donbass resorting to salvaging whatever weapons they could to stave off the Ukrainian advance in 2014. The fact that it is now Kiev’s turn to do so “characterizes the very difficult situation in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and isn't some kind of ascent or opportunity to strengthen Ukraine’s combat readiness,” as presented by Ukrainian officials and the Pentagon, Koshkin emphasized.
Kiev is in no condition to build a large number of FrankenSAMs anyway, the military observer suggested, in part because its economic capacity to do so has been destroyed. Secondly, the FrankenSAMs’ garage-built nature carries with it all the problems typically associated with handmade equipment, including questionable functionality.
“They have already collected and shipped out everything they had,” the observer said, pointing to Ukraine’s use of everything from M2 machine guns to 19th century Maxim machine guns. “They’re good, reliable machine guns. But the technology is from over a century ago, and so is the ammunition.” Ukraine has been turned into a “military laboratory for the disposal of everything the West doesn’t need,” and the FrankenSAM program will suffer the same fate, the Koshkin believes.
Ultimately, Koshkin is confident that Russia’s military will be on the lookout of any efforts by the US to establish “joint production” on Ukrainian territory, and that it will level these capabilities in precision strikes if and when they're up and running.
