Lord of War: How US spends most Ukraine aid back home on Americans

There is a great deal of consensus that the Second World War extricated the United States of America from the tight clutches of the Great Depression. In the years leading to the war, the New York Stock Exchange had crashed and burned, taking down with it most of the value in the economy. Banks failed. Unemployment peaked at 25 per cent or one in every four Americans was without employ.

America’s mobilization for the Second World War pulled almost 10 million people from civilian labour force and pumped them into the war effort. This was towards the end of 1941. The unemployment rate came down to less than 10 per cent.

The same script seems to be at work now. Post-pandemic America found itself in deep economic morass. The cost of living crisis and unemployment spiraled. But, the US seems to have saved itself again using the Ukraine War.

According to estimates and reports, close to 90 per cent of the $68 billion aid to Ukraine has stayed in America, being spent on Americans. Arguably, this was also the reason that a government shutdown on the issue of Ukraine aid was kicked down the road.

Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says: “Aid to Ukraine” has become a sticking point in congressional budget negotiations, but the term is a misnomer. Much of the money supports US activities, and much of the money directly supporting Ukraine is spent not abroad, but here in the United States.” Cancian wrote this in Breaking Defense.

More recently, this was called the “best-kept secret” of US aid to Ukraine.

Essentially, the US has pushed this money into defence sector manufacturing creating thousands of jobs, directly and indirectly. The defence and ordnance factories are making equipment and ammo to fill US’s own defence deficiencies created by transfers to Ukraine. Moreover, US is also using this money, and manufacturing, for supplying its NATO allies who it has goaded to part with old US-made and Soviet-era armaments.

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In all, the Russian invasion of Ukraine created an opportunity for the US to jump in and create demand for defence equipment and armaments, both in Ukraine as well as NATO allies who have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.
It has been a win-win for the US.

Figure this, the Washington Post identified 117 production lines across 31 states and 71 cities where American workers are manufacturing major weapons systems.

The Washington Post opinion observes that America’s war on terror did not serve the production of heavy defence systems much since: “… terrorists did not have jet fighters, so production faltered”.

The example cited in this respect is the case of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Since the US sent 1400 of these deadly missiles to Ukraine, the Pentagon inked a $624.6 million contract to make these missiles, when not one had been produced since 2005.

“If we were not aiding Ukraine, the United States would not be producing either of these weapons,” observed the Washington Post opinion.

About NATO allies, Poland transferred old German and Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine, apart from Soviet-era Mi attack gunships, and inked deals worth billions of dollars to replace these with top-of-the-line American M1A2 Abrams and Apache attack helicopters.