Last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to advance the FY2025 NDAA to the Senate floor, which includes a significant provision that would establish a regional contingency stockpile of U.S. weapons in Taiwan.
This stockpile could mirror the shortcomings observed in the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel (WRSA-I) program, and could have equally disastrous consequences for accountability. The Israel-based reserve’s lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability mechanisms serves as a cautionary tale for why such a model should not be replicated in Taiwan.
Insufficient checks, balances, and transparency
The Israel-based reserve does not have the necessary checks and balances to ensure end use monitoring of stockpiled weapons by Israeli forces. This absence of oversight mechanisms has allowed for withdrawals of military equipment without public documentation or congressional scrutiny. In Taiwan, a similar lack of oversight could result in the unregulated transfer and use of U.S. weapons, which carries with it potential to stoke regional tensions with additional military activity and use of force.
The Israel-based reserve's operations are also shrouded in secrecy, with no public inventory or clear policy guidance on allowable transfers of materials. This opacity has enabled unknown amounts of weapons transfers, in the shadow of ongoing conflict and civilian harm, without any public or legislative scrutiny. Establishing a similar stockpile in Taiwan at a time of heightened geopolitical strain in the Taiwan Strait, could diminish transparency further and erode trust in U.S. foreign policy decisions.
Legal, ethical, and escalatory concerns
One of the most concerning aspects of the Israel-based reserve program is its potential to embolden aggressive Israeli military actions by providing easy access to advanced weaponry. In the volatile context of Taiwan, where tensions with China are perpetually high, the presence of a U.S. weapons stockpile could encourage more confrontational postures. This in turn could trigger an arms race, destabilizing the region and posing significant risks to global security.
The legal frameworks governing the Israel-based reserve, such as the Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act, have also proven inadequate in ensuring comprehensive reporting and accountability. Recent legislative efforts, such as the emergency supplemental H.R.815 and the 2023 Securing American Arms Act, have further eroded these constraints, reducing oversight and allowing for more discretionary transfers of defense articles. Replicating this flawed legal and operational structure in Taiwan could similarly lead to U.S. arms being used in violation of international law and human rights standards, or otherwise being diverted to unintended end users.
Enhanced oversight and transparency
To avoid replicating the dangers of WRSA-I, any consideration of a U.S. weapons stockpile in Taiwan must be accompanied by stringent oversight and transparency measures. Congress should mandate comprehensive reporting on all arms transfers and establish robust mechanisms to ensure these weapons are used in accordance with international law and ethical standards. Without such measures, the risks of unchecked militarization and regional instability far outweigh any perceived strategic benefits.
The shortcomings of the Israel-based reserve program provide a clear warning against establishing a similar weapons stockpile in Taiwan. The lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability, coupled with the potential for human rights abuses and regional destabilization, make such a stockpile a highly risky and potentially disastrous proposition. The U.S. must learn from the WRSA-I experience and enact responsible arms transfer policies that promote stability, not undermine it.
Lillian Mauldin is a Founding Board Member of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency and a Research Fellow at the Center for International Policy. Lillian brings expertise and knowledge across a wide range of thematic issues and governance levels, including federal, state, and local. Lillian hopes to help enact policies that will prioritize holistic human wellbeing and that will demilitarize the institutional fabrics of the United States.
Soldiers drive their military vehicles past Taiwan flags during an army exercise in Hsinchu, central Taiwan January 27, 2010. The U.S. and China are currently at odds over an arms sales to Taiwan, according to local media. REUTERS/Nicky Loh (TAIWAN - Tags: MILITARY POLITICS)
Johnny Harris, a popular
YouTuber with nearly 6 million subscribers, published a video on Thursday that sought to answer an enormous question: “Why does the U.S. spend so much on its military”? He answers that question in extreme detail and ultimately arrives at uncovering why, in large part, the Pentagon budget is so high: the corrupt process of how lawmakers and big defense contractors and their lobbyists are all on the take.
The first half of Harris’s deep, 28 minute long dive into the U.S. military budget focuses on what the Pentagon is actually paying for, things like troops’ salaries and health care, operations and maintenance, bases, construction, and research and development. He notes that the Defense Department is so big and complex, it has
never been able to pass a financial audit.
“The U.S. is not a normal country with a regular military,” Harris says, by way of offering a kind of explanation as to why the Pentagon spends so much on all these things. “The U.S. is a global hegemon who uses its military to assert control and order over every corner of the globe,” he adds, in effect, flagging American primacy as a culprit.
“But there’s another reason why this budget is so high and this reason is much more infuriating to me,” Harris says. ”Most of this money is going to private corporations.”
Harris then spends the rest of the video breaking down our country’s corrupt procurement processes, starting with weapons companies. “We’ve got kind of a monopoly issue on our hands,” he says, noting how dozens of weapons contractors consolidated themselves down to 5 big corporations. “For this reason the prices can get pretty out of control.”
Dr. Heidi Peltier, Senior Researcher at the Watson Institute at Brown University and Director of the Costs of War Project, then tells Harris about how, because of their monopoly, weapons contractors can engage in severe
price gouging practices. “The Department of Defense has found routinely that there’s overcharging through corruption and waste and fraud,” she said, which, in part, has resulted in 40-50% profit margins.
For example, the Pentagon, Harris notes, paid Boeing $3,357 for one ball bearing, a part it could have gotten for $15. Harris then details how all the corruption works:
The big 5 contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon (now RTX) and Northrop Grumman — are “doing whatever they can to make sure the money keeps flowing to their companies” with lobbying and campaign contributions.
The revolving door: “In 2022 top defense companies hired 672 employees directly out of the Pentagon to work as lobbyists, board members and executives,” Harris says. According to Peltier: Contractors “promise a good, high paying job after that government official is out of government and so the government official has an incentive to give a generous contract to the contractor.”
Lawmakers’ profit: “To add insult to injury here, some of the lawmakers who approve the Pentagon’s budget own stocks in the defense contracting companies,” Harris says. “The lawmakers get richer if we spend more money on defense,” he adds, noting that this is a clear conflict of interest: “We should not do this. This is not a thing we should do.”
Lawmakers’ incentive for re-election: Harris then explains how defense contractors “intentionally allocate their operations all across the country” so “lawmakers are incentivized to keep these contractors making stuff in their district to provide jobs for their people so they can keep getting elected.”
Harris then highlights Sen. Roger Wicker as an example of a member of Congress who often pushes for more money for the Pentagon, which in turn goes to weapons companies, who then lobby Congress and make campaign contributions so lawmakers can tell their constituents they’re diverting federal funds to their districts to protect (or create) defense jobs:
“It is this system that has created an environment where there is very little political pushback to the endless ratcheting up of our military budget,” Harris says. Watch:
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Top image credit: Diplomacy Watch: A peace summit without Russia (RS)
The Ukrainian Defense Contract Group (UDCG or Ramstein) meeting in Germany this week has been officially postponed as President Biden bowed out to instead focus on the fallout from Hurricane Milton.
Initially planned for October 12, Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky was supposed to share his plans with Western policy makers and defense contractors at the meeting, saying “we will present the victory plan, clear, specific steps for a just end to the war.”
While the Ramstein summit has been postponed, Ukraine’s Western allies seem to be shifting their stances on how the war can, or should end. Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently indicated that Ukraine may have to give up some territorial integrity in exchange for peace or even NATO membership. Stoltenberg had previously explicitly ruled out any land for peace deals.
Western allies may be coming to a decision point on how they will move forward with the Ukraine-Russian war. Zelensky is regularly meeting with NATO allies, and said they are consistently affirming support, but still refusing to cross certain lines. For example, UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer reaffirmed the United Kingdom’s support for Ukraine after a meeting with the Ukrainian president on Thursday.
But when asked about allowing Ukraine to use British-made long range missiles deep into Russian territory, a spokesperson said, “We obviously want to put Ukraine in the strongest position. But no war has ever been won by a single weapon. And on Storm Shadow specifically, there has been no change to the UK government’s position on the use of long-range missiles.”
Further weapons packages and NATO assurances were likely to be approved at the Ramstein meeting, according to U.N. Secretary General Mark Rutte. ”What we need to do is to focus on what NATO can do,” he said. “What NATO can do is help to strengthen Ukraine's hands by providing enough military support. That's why I'm so happy that next Saturday we will participate in the Ramstein meeting.” Additional weapons packages were guaranteed at the previous meeting in 2023.
The postponement of this important confab is surely disappointing for Zelensky as it is preceded by Russian successes on the battlefield and a shift in opinion amongst Ukrainian soldiers and civilians around the war. Vice President Kamala Harris also recently refused to say if she would support a Ukrainian ascension into NATO if elected. Additionally, fiscal realities in Europe are shifting German and French support for Kyiv.
In other Ukraine are new this week:
On Tuesday Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that Ukraine is not able to beat Russia on the battlefield and called for a ceasefire. Reuters reports that Hungary has also decided to place a hold on a pending $50 billion G7 loan to Ukraine until after the American election. “We don't want to block anything, we just want to convince European leaders to change their strategy (on Ukraine) because the current strategy does not work,” Orban said.
Ukraine claims to have hit a North Korean weapons cache in Russia. On Wednesday Al Jazeerareported that a Ukrainian spokesperson announced that a drone attack in Bryansk successfully destroyed this strategic weapons cache. The Ukrainian General Staff said, “the arsenal stored ammunition for missile and artillery systems, including those delivered from North Korea, as well as glide bombs.” This comes as North Korean engineers and officers are reported to be assisting Russia in the conflict.
Russia continues to make territorial gains. Last week it captured Vuhledar in Ukraine's southeast, and this week Russian troops have now entered Toretsk, a city about 50 miles north, according to the New York Times. A Ukrainian Army spokeswoman, Anastasia Bobovnikova, confirmed late Monday that Russia had entered the city.
In this week’s October 7th State department briefing:
State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller was asked about Moscow’s recentsentencing of an American citizen to prison for allegedly fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. Miller said the United States has limited information as of now, and urges Moscow to grant consular access to him for Washington.
Miller did not answer a question concerning the report that North Koreans were killed fighting for Russia.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L), Russian President Vladimir Putin (R), Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan pose for a group picture during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China September 4, 2016. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj
On September 26-27 the Fletcher School at Tufts University hosted a workshop on “Global repercussions of Russia-West economic warfare.” It brought together two dozen experts, both academics and practitioners, to discuss the impact of the sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia by some 50 countries in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The meeting, organized by Tufts professors Christopher Miller and Daniel Drezner, did not come up with a decisive answer to the key question: are the sanctions working — and the related question, should they be wound up, continued, or intensified?
In part, this is because Western leaders have been vague when it comes to defining the goals of the sanctions, which have shifted over time. Initially, the goal was to deter Russia from launching the invasion. That did not work. So then the goal was to crash the Russian economy, force a bank run and collapse of the ruble, which would hopefully cause Russian elites, and/or the Russian people, to rise up against Putin and force him to abandon the war. For a week or two, that seemed to be working. But the Russian Central Bank imposed strict controls to stop the outflow of capital and ended the convertibility of the ruble. The Russian economy did not collapse.
After that, the goal shifted to one of attrition, increasing the cost to Putin in the hope that it will make him more willing to come to the negotiating table and end the war. By ratcheting down the declared goals, leaders can keep insisting that the sanctions are working.
Edward Fishman, a former U.S. Treasury official, said the “Goal was to shock the system, create chaos, and force Russian policy makers to redirect attention to developments inside Russia.” But we underestimated the skill of Russian financial managers and the extent to which they had been preparing for sanctions in the wake of the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Maximilian Hess, author of the new book, “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West,” argued that Putin has been preparing Russia for economic war with the West since the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which sanctioned individuals involved in the death of Russian banker Sergei Magnitsky.
Historically, sanctions have only worked in about one third of the cases. Success only comes if they are multilateral, involving a majority of key economic players. In the case of Russia, there was unexpected solidarity amongst the Europeans and between the Europeans and the U.S., which hit Russia hard given its dependence on oil and gas exports to Europe. However, only a few nations outside the West joined the sanctions (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia). China, India, Turkey and others increased their trade with Russia, buying the oil which was no longer flowing to Europe.
Despite the relative lack of success, sanctions are a popular tool, in large part because they are better than the alternatives — doing nothing, or going to war. They may be more important as a way of signaling political commitment amongst allies, rather than for their economic impact. Peter Harrell, a former National Security Council official, noted that “sanctions have been a growth industry over the past 20 years,” starting with Bill Clinton’s use of sanctions to target drug cartels and expanding as part of the post-9/11 War on Terror.
The U.S. was later encouraged by the success of the sanctions on Iran, which forced it to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015 limiting its nuclear program. However, the Russian economy is much larger, more diverse, and globally integrated than that of Iran, so the impact of the sanctions has been more modest. Harrell concluded that we “need to be realistic about what sanctions can achieve, and not expect that they are a magic bullet.”
While the sanctions were extensive, they mainly focused on the financial sector — cutting Russia out of the SWIFT financial transaction network, barring transactions with most Russian banks. Interestingly, Fishman revealed that the decision to freeze the Central Bank’s assets was only taken after the full-scale invasion. However, the West feared that an abrupt interruption of Russian energy exports would cause inflation to spike, so oil and gas continued to flow into Europe through 2022. And the banks handling payments for oil and gas exports were exempt from the sanctions.
The U.S. controls critical nodes in the finance sector, and the dollar remains the main currency for international trade and investment. But Elina Rybakova of the Peterson Institute pointed out that Washington has no such critical leverage over energy markets, and is still struggling to come up with ways to monitor and regulate the export of critical dual-use technologies.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s Craig Kennedy alluded to the fact that sanctions can be a negative-sum game, harming the country that is imposing them just as much as the target. This has certainly been true for Germany, hit by a 400% rise in the price of natural gas in 2022.
Organizer Daniel Drezner pointed out there has been a number of unintended consequences for which ramifications have yet to be unpacked. They include the rise of a “shadow fleet” of uninsured tankers shipping Russian oil to India and China, and the expansion of a shadow network of financial transactions facilitating Russia’s evasion of the sanctions.
By making it harder for Russians to export capital, the sanctions have boosted investment in the Russian economy, and has tied the business elite — the main advocates of Westernization — even more closely to the Kremlin. The war has further institutionalized the militarization of Russian economy, polity and society and it might be very hard to get the country off that path in a post-Putin future.
Finally, Drezner noted one important unintended consequence for Russia — that the war united the West, led Sweden and Finland to join NATO, and Germany to rearm. This nullifies a decades-long strategic goal of Russia to separate Europe and the U.S.
Analysts agreed to the assertions that the sanctions, for all their limitations, are squeezing the Russian economy’s prospects for long-term economic growth, particularly with regard to access to the investment and technology to develop new oil fields. Sergei Vakulenko, a fellow at Carnegie’s Russia Eurasia Center, argued that Russia is “facing graceful decline [in oil output] but not a sudden drop.” That seems to be a price Putin is willing to pay to continue his war in Ukraine.
It is hard to say how (and when) this conflict will end or what the end state will be. Will a future Russia rejoin the West at some point? Or is Russia destined to become a resource base for China and other nations now unaligned with the West or willing to “multi-vector” on the geopolitical landscape?
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