When I spoke to Ekateryna Derkach during a video conference on May 25, she had teary eyes. The previous night, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russian forces launched 36 Iranian-designed Shahed drones toward key infrastructure and military targets in the country’s western regions. In their apartment about 15 miles from kyiv, awakened by the intermittent sound of air alarms throughout the night, Ekateryna, her husband Andrey and her boys, ages 6 and 12, hid in a hallway and in the bathroom.
Russian aerial bombardments of Ukrainian cities have left the population in a constant state of alert. “We can’t sleep at night, we’re all very tired,” says Derkach, 36, a press manager for a US-based IT company with an R&D office in kyiv. “They start these missiles at noon, [or] at three o’clock, when it’s really hard. But fortunately, casualties from these attacks are increasingly rare, at least in kyiv, which relies on a defensive system of anti-aircraft systems, including US-made Patriot missile batteries, which in May were credited to have shot down 13 Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, some of them the most sophisticated weapons in the Russian arsenal.
But this air defense – and other essential elements of Ukraine’s war effort – relies on dwindling arms supplies from the United States and NATO. In the southeast, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched their long-awaited counteroffensive, spending huge amounts of equipment: laser-guided rockets, artillery shells, howitzers and, of course, drones, which are in some way the decisive weapon of the conflict. . The demands of war have strained the country’s supply chain and those of U.S. and European allies. Stockpiles of rockets and missiles and the parts needed to build them – from titanium castings, ball bearings and ammunition explosives to solid-state rocket motors, rugged microchips, circuitry integrated and optical sensors – are reaching dangerously low levels. The United States has already stopped transferring Javelins, long-range man-portable anti-tank missiles, critical to stopping the Russian offensive early in the conflict.
“We’re at the point where, with certain things like artillery, if we wanted to give more to the Ukrainians, we would have to remove them from some of our National Guard units,” says Marc Cancian, a senior National Guard official. . advisor to the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We are already at the point where [US defense officials] are not comfortable. The question is whether they become even more uncomfortable.”
In short, the war in Ukraine has highlighted the challenges of maintaining a modern military in a protracted conflict, and it has prompted the United States to rethink the financing and structure of its military supply chains, which have long relied on a small group. number of huge manufacturers, century-old factories and Cold War-era thinking. The future of the military-industrial complex could be much more decentralized, several military analysts say, with small shops, tech startups and mom-and-pop manufacturers fueling the defense base. This is, in many ways, a model that resembles Ukraine’s defense industry, which has by necessity become a small-scale, hyper-flexible industry, with drones and other devices designed and built, often on the fly, in workshops and garages. .
United States has allocated more than $48 billion in additional appropriations for security assistance to Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022. In addition to this, as noted in The New York TimesThe recently approved $858 billion national military budget includes a 55 percent increase in Army funding for missile purchases, a 47 percent increase in Navy weapons purchases, and expanded authorization for the Ministry of Defense to make multi-year spending commitments.
