How does US military aid work if the defence companies are non privately owned.
In: Other
I’ll assume we’re talking about US military aid to Ukraine here. Past or future aid packages to other countries were or will be implemented differently.
Military aid is broadly implemented in two ways:
– Ukraine is given a voucher to buy stuff from US arms companies. Ukraine picks what it wants, the US government pays the bill.
– The US military is given funding to replace vehicles or weapons. The replaced items are sent to Ukraine.
In both cases, the US government buys new stuff from private US companies, and something gets sent to Ukraine. The advantage of the first approach is that Ukraine gets new weapons, the advantage of the second approach is that Ukraine gets weapons immediately.
The various military aid bills also tend to include things that are not directly relevant to the recipient. For example, the latest aid bill included hundreds of millions for military R&D. This has very little to do with how military aid works, and everything to do with budget politics.
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