The Republican presidential candidate claimed that Washington’s stockpiles have been “emptied of all our ammunition” to arm Kiev
The U.S. military is running out of ammunition as President Joe Biden’s administration depletes stockpiles to arm Ukraine and other nations, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said. The GOP firebrand has vowed to turn the tide and make a “historic investment in reconstruction” the American military, if elected.
Speaking by phone with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky last month, Trump reiterated his long-standing promise to quickly end the conflict between Kiev and Moscow if elected in November. In June, the former U.S. president also made clear he would stop giving tens of billions of dollars in handouts to Ukraine.
Speaking to supporters alongside his vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Trump lamented: “They released a report talking about all the vulnerable areas… we are weak here, we are weak there.”
“It’s like saying, ‘We don’t have any ammunition,’” he said. “You know why. We gave everything to Ukraine and several other places. We gave them everything.”
According to the former president, billions of dollars worth of weapons and ammunition were given away for free.
Experts from the U.S. Congressional Commission on National Defense Strategy released a 312-page assessment in late July warning that the U.S. military “lacks both the capabilities and capacity necessary to be confident that it can deter and prevail in combat.”
According to the report, in a hypothetical future conflict with China, the latter would likely be aided, at least economically and possibly also militarily, by countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea. This would make the chances of a US victory increasingly slim, military experts predicted.
“Unclassified public war games suggest that in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in just three to four weeks, with some critical munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days,” concluded the document.
Experts from the commission attributed the current situation to serious shortcomings in the US defense industry, which, they said, would require significant investments to correct.