Tougher US weapons tracking urged in Ukraine
House Republicans, who will hold a slim majority in the next Congress, have warned the Biden administration to expect far-tougher oversight of the extensive military assistance it has provided Ukraine.
The administration, anticipating such demands as the commitment of military aid under President Biden fast approaches $20 billion, has worked in recent weeks to publicize its efforts to track weapons shipments. Both the State Department and the Pentagon have outlined plans, including more inspections and training for the Ukrainians, meant to prevent US arms from falling into the wrong hands — initiatives that have failed thus far to quell Republican skeptics calling for audits and other accountability measures.
Most in Washington are in agreement that, generally, the push for more oversight is a good thing. But experts caution there are credible limitations to ensuring an airtight account of all weapons given to Ukraine that are likely to leave Biden's harshest critics unsatisfied.
"There are shortcomings of end-use monitoring in the best of circumstances, and of course Ukraine isn't in the best of circumstances," said Elias Yousif, a researcher on the global arms trade with the Stimson Center. "There has to be some willingness to be practical about what we can achieve."
To date, the megaphone for demanding change has been controlled primarily by the GOP. Congress “will hold our government accountable for all of the funding for Ukraine,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said this month in announcing a measure to audit the aid program after Biden requested another $37 billion for the government in Kyiv. “There has to be accountability going forward,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, House Republicans’ current leader, told CNN in the interview in which he warned against giving Ukraine a “blank check” to fight off Russia’s invasion.
Yet the reckoning could begin before the Republican takeover. A series of provisions on offer in the House-passed version of this year's annual defense authorization bill would require a web of overlapping reports from the Pentagon and the inspectors general who police transfers of articles of war, plus the establishment of a task force to design and implement enhanced tracking measures.
And unlike the rising GOP chorus of Ukraine skepticism, such line items — while yet to be reconciled with the Senate’s version of the bill, which is still pending in that chamber — largely enjoy bipartisan support.
“The taxpayers deserve to know that investment is going where it’s intended to go,” Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and a veteran-turned-lawmaker, said in an interview.
Crow led an effort in the House Armed Services Committee to include in the defense bill instructions to the Defense Department Inspector General to review, audit, investigate, and otherwise inspect the Pentagon’s efforts to support Ukraine. He called the directive “necessary,” even if he does not count himself among the critics insinuating the Defense Department and the Ukrainians have failed to take the matter seriously enough.
"In any war, there can be missteps and misallocation of supplies," he explained. But Crow also acknowledged that there were likely to be limitations to the scope of accounting that the United States can provide.
Lawmakers, Pentagon officials, and experts all note that, thus far, there are few tangible reasons for concern. Ukraine, they said, has been a proactive steward of the assistance it has received, readily reporting back about how US military aid has been put to use, a gesture officials believe is a function of Kyiv’s effort to secure more of it. There also is a sense the Ukrainians have too much national pride at stake to risk compromising their effort by siphoning off weapons to the black market.