“The Pentagon announced on June 21, 2023 that it had overestimated the value of arms sent to Ukraine over the past two years by $6.2 billion. Now, the discovery of additional errors brings the total unspent sum to $8.2 billion.”
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"U.S. Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) allows the president to allocate equipment from U.S. stocks, such as ammunition, vehicles, and medical supplies, to respond to crises abroad. PDA arises from the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
The Pentagon’s “efforts to properly value defense articles for drawdown are hampered because the Foreign Assistance Act does not clearly define certain terms and DOD lacks PDA-specific valuation guidance,” according to the GAO.
Due to the errors, the Defense Department can send a further $2 billion in weapons to Ukraine to cover the amount already approved by U.S. President Joe Biden."
8.9k upvotes. If there was ever a comment that convinced me Reddit is astroturfed / an op, this is it. Because they are objectively wrong. Or at least intentionally misleading.
They’re focusing on the fact that the valuation equipment changed and ignoring what that actually means. Sure, by itself it doesn’t affect US taxpayers. But the point is, the military says they overvalued it by $2, so that allows them to send $2 billion more worth of equipment. That’s additional stocks of weapons that ostensibly have to be replaced, which is paid for by tax dollars.
And while it’s not provably corrupt, it strains credulity to think this was not done in order to ship more weapons. Revaluations of this kind are much much more likely because someone wants it revalued, i.e. corruption.
No, no, it’s the US government. We don’t use terms like corruption here…fulfilling lobby quotas is a better term…