Since February 2022, the Biden Administration has settled into a fairly regular pattern of military transfers to Ukraine which, together with other allies, has amounted to at least $50 billion in assistance, including weapons, munitions, and training. The United States accounts for the lion’s share of that assistance, with its nearly $37 billion contribution eclipsing all other U.S. military assistance partnerships. The value of U.S. assistance to Ukraine over the last 15 months alone is more than 10 times the value of U.S. military aid provided annually to Israel, and more than most NATO members devote to their entire annual defense budgets.
Though assistance has come in a variety of forms and through various processes, much of the enterprise has depended on the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the president to transfer a certain amount of material from existing U.S. stockpiles each year. Though typically limited to $100 million per year, Congress authorized the administration to draw down up to $11 billion for FY2022 and $14.5 billion for FY2023. According to the Department of State, since August 2021 the Secretary of State has used the authority, delegated by the President, to make thirty-seven drawdowns for Ukraine, worth approximately $21.1 billion in total. At least 32 of those drawdowns have taken place since the invasion.
Congress has also appropriated additional funds for other more conventional security assistance programs, including $18 billion appropriated for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and $4.7 billion in Foreign Military Financing. Some of those funds are also intended to support European allies and backfill equipment they have transferred to Ukraine.
In addition to a growing volume of assistance, the sophistication of the capabilities the United States has been willing to provide has also evolved. With escalation concerns in mind, the Biden administration has followed a familiar pattern of initially resisting requests for more advanced platforms only to eventually agree to their provision. The dynamic has played out in iterative debates around larger artillery pieces, HIMARs, mobile armor platforms, tanks, and now advanced fighter aircraft as well as long-range precision fires.
Ukrainian offensive and afterward
After months of largely static lines, all eyes are now on a much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive which, by many accounts, is already in its initial shaping phase. In an effort to enable the operation, Ukraine’s backers have surged transfers of key materiel, including artillery shells, mobile armor, and other enabling support.
But the wave of recent assistance may reflect the “high water mark” of international assistance to Ukraine – funding and stores are running low, and enabling offensive operations of the scale envisioned by Ukraine this summer requires vast amounts of military hardware. As such, given the scale of recent transfers, expectations for the offensive are high and perhaps misaligned with the likely trajectory of the conflict.
As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee noted in a recent Foreign Affairs article, whatever the outcome of this offensive, the war is unlikely to conclude in the near term. That may pose a challenge to the more circumstance-based approach that the United States and its partners have taken so far in supplying Kyiv, and may help explain why the administration has not yet requested additional emergency supplementals for Ukraine. The White House may in fact be hoping it can point to dramatic Ukrainian successes in its much-awaited offensive as justification for additional support, much as it did in the late summer and fall of 2022. But as Kofman and Lee explain, even notable battlefield advances by Ukraine will not be the end of this war. Moscow has made no indications it is willing to make the political choice to abandon its war effort even in the context of military setbacks. Kyiv, on the other hand, remains steadfast in its commitment to retaking all Russian-occupied territory, including those captured by Moscow in 2014, something that seems militarily and diplomatically unlikely, at least in the near future. The Biden administration says it is committed to supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” But fulfilling that pledge in the absence of a near-term diplomatic solution will face mounting practical and political challenges, including a growing minority in both parties opposed to military assistance to Ukraine as well as physical limitations in supplying sufficient defense equipment to enable any additional offensive operations by Kyiv. If the Biden administration is determined to continue its support for Ukraine, a more sustainable approach to security assistance will be required.