© AP/Jang Se-youngSouth Korean army soldiers and 155mm howitzer shells • Goseong, South Korea
The US has asked its forces stationed in South Korea to provide military equipment for Ukraine, the Department of Defense said on Thursday. While the Pentagon did not state what kind of equipment would be requisitioned, earlier reports suggested that the US is sourcing artillery shells from Seoul.
US Forces Korea confirmed the Pentagon's request, with a spokesman saying:
"It would have zero impact on our operations and our ability to execute on our ironclad commitment to the defence of our ally, the Republic of Korea."The spokesman did not specify what kind of equipment had been requested, how much would be supplied, or whether any had already been transferred.
However, the New York Times claimed on Tuesday that the Pentagon has already given Ukraine 155mm artillery shells from its stocks in South Korea and Israel. The US has supplied Ukraine with just over a million of these shells, "a sizable portion" of which came from these two countries, the newspaper reported, citing an anonymous US official.
Ukrainian forces currently fire between 4,000 and 7,000 of these shells per day, according to American officials interviewed by CNN. Estimates of Russian fire have varied hugely from anywhere between 5,000 and 60,000 artillery rounds per day. Ukraine's artillery disadvantage is compounded by the fact that its Western-donated guns - the German-made Panzerhaubitze 2000 and American M777 howitzer, for example - were never designed for such sustained rates of fire, and are plagued by battlefield breakdowns.
The US is "looking under every rock" for ammunition, an anonymous official told Fox News on Wednesday. Months of media reports have suggested that the US-led effort to arm Ukraine has left stockpiles in some NATO nations close to the point of exhaustion.
Against this background, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin traveled to Germany this week to head a meeting of the 'Defense Contact Group', a panel of nearly 50 countries that meet regularly to pledge new arms packages for Ukraine. Speaking before the meeting on Thursday, Austin said the US is looking to "energize the industrial base" to produce more weapons and ammunition.
“For approximately three decades, consecutive US administrations were explicitly warned that Ukraine’s NATO membership would be the last straw for Moscow. Numerous Russian officials kept cautioning this would destabilize the deeply divided post-Soviet country. These warnings were made both in public and private, and were reiterated by other NATO members, geopolitical experts, Russian opposition leaders and even some American diplomats, including a US ambassador in Moscow. Yeltsin once told former president Bill Clinton that NATO expansion was “nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed”. Clinton, infamous for his aggression on Yugoslavia, ignored the warning and by 1999, less than a decade after the “not an inch to the east” promise was made, most of Eastern Europe was in NATO. Despite this encroachment, Vladimir Putin still tried to establish closer ties with the political West, ratified START II and even offered to join NATO. America responded with unilateral withdrawal from key arms control treaties and color revolutions in Moscow’s geopolitical backyard. By the mid-2000s, Russia was flanked by two hostile US-backed regimes on its southern and western borders (Georgia and Ukraine). Major NATO members, such as Germany and France, warned this would lead to an inevitable response from Moscow . A WikiLeaks cable dated September 2005 reads:
Declassified intelligence reveals the massive scope of US aggression against the world [Link]
“ The US has used the secretive 127e authorization protocol to "legally" conduct the 23 proxy wars in those 3 years. Naturally, the US definition of "legal" is questionable at best, given its horrendous track record of illegal invasions across the globe and thousands, possibly even more, illegal detention centers around the world, run by the CIA, NSA and numerous other US three-letter intelligence agencies. The self-proclaimed exterritoriality of US laws is as illegal as it could possibly be. And yet, the US insists it can dictate other countries to comply with those same laws, despite the fact that there is no conceivable mechanism to make this belligerent approach legal.“