US permanent representative to NATO Julianne Smith admitted on Tuesday that due to the amount of armory they’ve been sending to Ukraine, almost all countries in the bloc face depleted weapons and ammunition stockpiles.
He used Estonia as an example of a country that is facing very real shortfalls after giving a massive quantity of aid to Ukraine.
Speaking at an event hosted by the CSIS think-tank, Ambassador Smith noted the efforts of the US, NATO, and the EU to deal with the shortfall by urging the military industry to ramp up production.
Smith explained that while NATO has tasked the Conference of National Armaments Directors (CNAD) to deal with the declining stockpiles across the bloc, the “contact group” for Ukraine is organizing deliveries to Kyiv whereas the European Union has a separate initiative aimed at the military industry.
All of these efforts, according to Smith, are aimed at persuading the western military industry to expand production, pointing out to CSIS that the key here is to find something that will help the US, NATO, and the EU work together and not at odds.
Although military aid has been flowing to Ukraine from both the US and its allies since 2014, the funneled deliveries of ammo, small arms, and heavy weapons – including tanks and artillery- ramped up when Russia escalated the conflict in February despite repeated warnings from Moscow to Western nations that arming Kyiv will only prolong the ongoing conflict.
The initial shipments that Kyiv received were just the surplus of arms that the US and the other Western governments had but soon they started digging in their own military stockpiles, which were already decimated by the years of focusing on expeditionary wars and counterinsurgency.
As numerous experts pointed out that even the Pentagon stockpiles were not infinite, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called for more production, especially after Moscow ramped up its own defense production, especially of tanks, missiles, and artillery ammo with Dmitry Medvedev telling West in October not to hold its breath that Russia will run out of weapons.
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