Pentagon buyers are touring factories in Eastern Europe

WRITER IN POLAND, NEAR THE BORDER WITH UKRAINE-Just outside the runway at a Polish airport, forklift trucks busy unloading an Air Force C-17 transport jet of its cargo along with a smaller propeller-driven civil aircraft, which carrying pallets of green boxes full of ammunition from each other to a nearby asphalt parking lot filled with dozens of them.

Some were carrying American-made weapons, while others had a variety of Eastern European-made ordnance, all representative of Ukraine’s top priorities for military assistance that would soon be loaded into a fleet of tractor-trailers waiting to roam nearby.

The Pentagon procures most of the US -made weapons it sends to kyiv, Ukraine, from their own arsenal, but it relies on American defense contractors to inspect ammunition factories in Eastern Europe for new weapons manufactures designed by America’s former enemy, the Soviet Union, to fulfill the president’s promises Joe Biden to increase military assistance to Ukraine.

Ukraine still uses many weapons common to the Russian military, such as kalashnikov modern.

And while Ukraine is asking for more sophisticated weapons, such as Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missileshas received widespread attention, the country’s armed forces are in dire need of a wide range of ammunition, including tens of millions of rounds for the Soviet era, weapons that are not modern, but Ukrainian staples. military.

The Pentagon calls these types of weapons, including rockets, artillery shells, and ammunition for machine guns and assault rifles, “unusual ammunition“, because the ammunition is incompatible with that used by the United States and many allied countries, commonly known as standard NATO weapons.

And since the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon has been buying large quantities of such weapons through various U.S. defense companies to supply client hosts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other countries that still rely on Soviet -designed weapons.

One of those companies is Ultra Defense Corp. in Tampa, Florida, with approximately 60 employees and has built a dynamic business working in factories in Romania, Bosnia, Serbia, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

Those countries provide about 90% of ammunition unusual products purchased by the Pentagon, according to Matthew Herring, the company’s owner, even though his company provides only a fraction of the total Pentagon orders.

Herring, who bought the company in 2011 when it was a three -man company providing Russian -made helicopters to Afghan forces, is now in Poland meeting with Ukrainian officials to find out what else can be done. of his company to provide them with Eastern Bloc ammunition. .

“A month ago, when kyiv was rounded, it was:

‘What do we need in the next 48 hours?’ ”Herring said.

“But now the Ukrainians are preparing for a long battle and it is, ‘How can we get enough to support us in this battle?’

“So it’s a broader look at what they need now.”

The Pentagon’s non-standard ammunition program was created in direct response to the investigation New York Times in 2008 which exposed to illegal sale of firearms made in China to the US military in Afghanistan, which was the subject of the 2016 film “Dogs of War ”.

According to Herring, after that scandal, the Pentagon contracted with large defense companies to provide non-standard ammunition for Afghanistan and then allowed smaller companies like him to bid for both types of ammunition. service.

Whether some European countries that still produce Soviet -designed ammunition will sell their products to Ukraine is a political decision, which may depend in part on whether they value maintaining good relations with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., A former Army Ranger serving on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committee, said in an interview last week that most of Ukraine’s non-standard ammunition “is will be sold very quickly“because of the current speed of fighting in Russia.

The Ukrainian military needs to move on common weapons of NATO in the future, he said, to further tap the vast ammunition depot of the West sitting in bunkers in Europe and the United States.

That move is already being carried out, in part, by the Pentagon’s provision 155mm howitzer costing five battalions to meet Ukraine’s intense demand for so-called long-range fire, similar in capability to the 152mm Soviet-designed guns used by Ukraine against Russia.

So while companies like Ultra Defense Corp. will continue to buy as many as 152mm artillery shells for

As it can with artillery weapons inherited from Ukraine, the Pentagon will aggressive moves 184,000 shells from its stockpile in Europe for 155mm howitzers it retrieved from Army and Marine Corps stockpiles in the United States and shipped to kyiv.

At a news conference last week, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said that non-standard munitions remained an integral part of the U.S. arms supply to Ukraine.

“This is life here for the Ukrainian armed forces,” Kirby said of the ammunition supplies delivered to kyiv.

“We don’t talk much about small arms. It doesn’t make headlines, I understand, but in every discussion we have with Ukrainians, they talk about how important it is. ”

From the invasion, he said, the United States coordinated and delivered more than 50 million small arms to Ukraine, most of them Soviet-designed.

Kirby said the United States continues to “talk to allies and partners about their unusual inventories of ammunition” in an effort to get more ammunition into Ukraine.

“It had a really significant impact on the battlefield,” he said of the Soviet -designed artillery.

“They use that bullet every day to defend their country.”

John Ismay reports from an unspecified location in Poland near the Ukrainian border and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

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