More Howitzers, Artillery Rounds, UAVs Headed to Ukraine

Another $800 million in security assistance is headed to Ukraine, the Pentagon announced today. This is the 8th drawdown package announced, which is gear pulled from existing U.S. military stock. Included in this package are 72 155 mm howitzers, 144,000 artillery rounds, 121 Phoenix Ghost unmanned aerial systems and vehicles with which to tow the howitzers.

The Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial System, said Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby, is a system developed by the Air Force in response to Ukrainian requirements.

"Phoenix Ghost is a tactical, unmanned aerial system ... [it] provides similar capabilities to the Switchblade series of unmanned systems — similar capabilities, but not exact," said Kirby. At this time he was not willing to elaborate further on the capabilities of the Phoenix Ghost.

The Phoenix Ghost system, he said, will likely require minimal training for Ukrainian users who are already experienced in operating other UASs.

"We're going to be working through those training requirements directly with the Ukrainian Armed Forces," he said.

Last week the U.S. announced it would ship 18 howitzers to Ukraine, along with 40,000 artillery shells to go with them. The U.S. will now ship 72 additional howitzers to Ukraine and 144,000 additional shells. That brings the total number of howitzers to 90.

"These additional 72 howitzers will help basically fit out five more ... artillery battalions for the Ukrainians," Kirby said. "This was ... very much in keeping with their needs, specifically in the Donbas, and the kind of fighting that has already started there and we expect to continue over days and weeks ahead."

The latest security assistance package also includes 72 tactical vehicles which can be used to tow the howitzers.

So far, eight drawdown packages of security assistance have been targeted at Ukraine. Helping move that equipment and also to move equipment and supplies donated by U.S. partner and allied nations, is the Eucom Control Center - Ukraine.

During a background briefing this morning, a senior defense official said Eucom Control Center - Ukraine was established in March in Stuttgart, Germany, to support both security force assistance and humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainians.

"[It's] responsible for consolidating Ukrainian assistance needs. The Eucom Control Center coordinates and synchronizes timely delivery of U.S., allied and partner contributions of assistance," the official said. "This cell is co-located with the UK-led International Donor Coordination Center, which coordinates resources from amongst our international community partners to enable donor countries from around the world to provide military equipment and aid to the armed forces of Ukraine."

The official said for the latest security assistance package, Eucom Control Center - Ukraine has been working with the services and with the joint staff on sourcing solutions for the equipment and material. It's expected the first flights will leave the U.S. in the next 24 to 48 hours and that the first rounds of that equipment will be in the Ukrainian hands by the end of the weekend.

When a country that has expanded its territory for 1000 years (Russia) and is, by itself, 69% of the territory of NATO, combined, and 4x the territory of the EU says it feels threatened, you know it’s lying.

Unfortunately, in most of the U.S., students are only taught the history of Western Europe. Anything about the formation of the states East of Germany isn't taught. Throughout its history, Russia struggled with being backward relative to its Western neighbors. It's expansion to the Baltic, at the expense of Sweden after the Great Northern War, was considered a great accomplishment of Peter the Great's. (He's the guy who had his own son tortured and killed on paranoid suspicion of treason BTW.) Russia's old capitol of St. Petersburg (founded in 1703) is a newer city than the U.S.'s old capitol, Philadelphia (founded in (1682).

After signing "A Treaty of Eternal Peace" with Poland, under Peter the Great, Russia commenced bribing the Lords of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to weaken it, and then took Belarus and Western Ukraine from it in the partitions of Poland between 1772-1795. So in the 1000 year history of Russia, neither Ukraine, Belarus, or the "Novorossiya" region now at issue with Putin's recent annexation of Crimea and the present invasion of Ukraine, were long part of the Russian Empire. (Kalliningrad has been even less.) In short, Putin has been most aggressive attempting to regain control of regions that Russia claims by revanchism with weak historical justification. Remember the former U.S. Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.

The problem with Russia is not that it has been imposed upon, but that it imposes on others. Part of the Russian mythos, dating back almost a thousand years, and given firm foundation by its vast territorial expanse acquired at swordpoint, is its indomitable martial prowess. In 1898, the Russian General Staff carried out a comprehensive study of Russian warfare since the foundations of the state. In the summary volume, the editor told his readers that they could take pride in their country’s military record and face the future with confidence — between 1700 and 1870, Russia had spent 106 years fighting 38 military campaigns, of which 36 had been “offensive”.

WWII has been improperly taught in the U.S. as being about the harshness of the "Treaty of Versailles", (which was more properly the "Treaty of Peace with Germany", which was one of many treaties of the Versailles Peace Conference). In reality, WWII was caused by Germany and the Soviet Union's desire to conquer its neighbors. The British and French had abandoned their alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia, emboldening Hitler to consume his neighbors. These two colonial powers never wanted to recreate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which meant the the Second Polish Republic was left too small to defend itself alone from the more industrially developed Germans and certainly not against Germany, Austria, the Free City of Danzig, Slovakia, and the Soviet Union which all attacked Poland in concert in September 1939. Lenin had offered all of Belarus, and all of Ukraine West of the Dnieper to Poland at Riga in 1921, but that was declined under pressure from the British and French. Had that not happened WWII probably wouldn't have occurred as it did, but that is just so much speculation. That issue recurs at present as Putin had offered to split Ukraine with Poland when Tusk was PM, and Putin has again claimed Eastern Urkaine now.

[I may have mentioned this to you before - but we killed a Chinese advisor in Vietnam about 20 miles southwest of Danang. He was riding in a sampan and our sniper shot him through the neck at about 300m and his body fell in the river.

We fished him out and the lieutenant got his silver ring - this guy was big, about 6 feet tall - and his ring slipped easily over my thumb!

So they had advisors working with them against us.]

Good shooting. This is what gets me with all the bellyaching from ostensible right-wingers about merely supplying the Ukies with outdated Russian equipment and our table scraps. Meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese were sending some of their guys to tangle with ours in Korea and Vietnam. That’s on top of providing their state-of-the-art equipment to kill Americans in both locales. And as of now, between Afghanistan and Ukraine, the Russian to US kill ratio by being the armorer for third countries is still 3 to 1, given that we lost 100,000 in Korea and Vietnam vs Russia’s 33,000, if you take Ukraine’s most optimistic numbers (20,000) and the Soviet Union’s (likely lowballed) Afghan War friendly dead numbers (13,000) at face value.

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