What The Supplemental REALLY Means
Enough breathing room for Europe to get its act together.
We live in a world where we can just flip a switch and instantly illuminate a space, unlike our ancestors who were used to waiting for the sun, or the process of lighting a candle. Natural sources are slower and less complete in what they reveal.
We live in a world where the good guys used to win after 90 - 150 minute story arcs, but in the last decade that’s expanded to a dozen 45 minute episodes, with more room for character development and nuance. The real world is never like this - battles end in an instant and the survivors aren’t healthy and whole in the next scene, they trudge forever under the load of their experiences. And wars can drag on for generations.
Despite the massive annual U.S. military industrial complex expenditure, far too much of that goes into fiscal disasters like the Lockheed Skypig, the Little Crappy Ships, and a trio of unarmed destroyers. Thankfully, the M-10 Booker looks like it’s going to do its job without arriving a decade late and enormously overweight.
Ukraine needs a torrent of 155mm shells and despite the U.S. keeping a thousand M-777 howitzers, 231 M-109 self propelled howitzers, and who knows how many of the 358 older M-198 howitzers in storage, we apparently lack deep reserves.
The only ones that seems to be making the right moves are the eastern Europeans with direct experience of Russian domination.
The Baltic states emptied their arsenals and turned over their couches for spare change.
The Poles noticed the Ukrainians back the Russians up with a dozen HIMARS … so they ordered 498 of their own.
The Czechs rounded up 300,000 155mm shells and think they can lay hands on another 700,000.
All thirteen Solvakian MiG-29s went to Ukraine and Poland came up with a similar number.
Denmark became honorary eastern Europeans when they gave Ukraine all of their artillery.
Living memory is fading fast, but how many of you understand what I allude to when I say El Alamein, Midway, Stalingrad? These are the places the Italians, Japanese, and Germans, respectively, were stopped cold in 1942. Today Europe is in 1941 mode - aware that there IS a problem, that it is NOT going away, and that something MUST be done.
The supplemental has given Ukraine a lifeline until the U.S. election, and we all cross our fingers that western European economies rub up against their eastern European neighbors for good luck, then start making the right moves in a heck of a hurry.
Further U.S. support is contingent on the outcome of November’s Civil War Referendum, but American corruption and cowardice is just a side show. We’re Gonna Fight: International Edition is the way the world is headed and it’s long since passed the point where personalities had much influence on the direction.