By Karoun Demirjian

WASHINGTON — Republicans in Congress sharply questioned senior Pentagon officials Tuesday (Feb 28) about the tens of billions of dollars in military and other aid the United States has sent to Ukraine, casting fresh doubt on whether they would embrace future spending as Democrats pleaded for a clear-eyed assessment of how much more money would be needed.

The exchanges at two House committee hearings, coming just days after the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, highlighted how concerns about the high cost of sending weapons to Kyiv have intensified on Capitol Hill. The growing doubts have threatened what has been a strong bipartisan consensus in favour of the aid and could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to win congressional approval of funds to replenish its military assistance accounts. The funding inflection point could come as soon as this summer, months earlier than previously expected.

The hearings also illustrated how members of both parties, despite expressing confidence that a majority in Congress remains committed to supporting Ukraine, are concerned that a determined minority — including right-wing Republicans who eschew US involvement in foreign conflicts and liberal anti-war Democrats — may weaken that resolve if the war continues to drag on.

“We’re all concerned about accountability,” Rep. Joe Wilson, R-SC, who has supported Ukraine funding ventures in the past, said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. “Please, let’s get this publicized so the American people can trust what the expenditures are.”

Tensions were on display Tuesday as Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., an outspoken critic of funding for Ukraine, quizzed a top Defence Department official about allegations of lost and diverted weapons, whistle-blowers and fraud.

“Accountability of the weapons shipped in is absolutely paramount, especially the most sensitive weapons, to ensure they are being used for their intended purposes and not diverted for nefarious purposes,” Clyde told Robert P. Storch, the Pentagon’s inspector general.

Storch and other Pentagon officials testified that there had been no substantiated instances of sensitive weapons being diverted for improper purposes, but his statements did not silence the critics.

Clyde’s questions nonetheless were striking since he does not have a seat on the Armed Services Committee. He was invited to participate by its chair, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., a staunch supporter of supplying military assistance to Ukraine. Rogers offered Clyde the bulk of his question time for the grilling, after noting that the record-setting levels of military assistance required “an unprecedented level of oversight by Congress”.

Pledges to send tanks, the grinding nature of the war on the ground and a steady clamour from certain corners of Congress to greenlight advanced systems for Ukraine have threatened to drain war funds at a faster clip than appropriators anticipated in December, when lawmakers approved about $45 billion in military and other assistance, projecting it would last until the end of September.

The steep price tag of the war has prompted Congress to issue a battery of oversight requirements for information about how the money has been spent. Some of those details have been provided to lawmakers, but few have reached the public.

The accelerating spending and dearth of detailed information have fuelled the resolve of several naysayers, who doubled down this week on a campaign to cast the Ukraine assistance program as a failed boondoggle, with the apparent tacit blessing of party leaders.

“You cannot testify that we have complied with the end-use monitoring requirements at all times during this conflict, can you?” insisted Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., accusing Storch of dodging.

Democrats, too, voiced concerns Tuesday, pleading with Pentagon leaders to be straight with them about how much more money lawmakers could expect to be asked to approve for Ukraine.

“How many more times do you think Congress needs to provide aid?” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., asked Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defence for policy, during his appearance before the Armed Services panel. “What do you think, at the end, is the endgame?”

Some Democrats on the House Appropriations panel that oversees military spending posed similar questions to Celeste Wallander, the assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs.

“How much bigger would the bill be?” asked Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, expressing concern about the administration’s successive requests for more aid. “We have to at least anticipate that possibility that we would see a higher bill next year.”

Pentagon leaders were reluctant to commit to either a figure or a timeline upon which they would be seeking additional funds, saying that the vagaries of the war made it impossible to commit to a schedule.

“I don’t have a sense of whether it would be higher or reduced; I just know that we are planning for the kind of effective deterrent force that Ukraine will need,” Wallander said.

Kahl suggested that the demands of some lawmakers to step up military assistance to Ukraine could further complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to keep the war effort supplied.

In the past week, the bipartisan group of House members calling on President Joe Biden to supply Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets has more than tripled. On Tuesday, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a member of the group and a former Air Force officer, implored Kahl to explain why programs to train Ukrainian pilots to operate the systems had not commenced.

Kahl insisted that doing so would not save time, estimating that it would take about 18 months to train Ukrainian pilots to use the F-16 jets, which was also the Pentagon’s shortest projected time frame for sending them.

“It doesn’t make sense to start training them on a system they may never get,” he said, noting that while F-16s were a priority for Ukraine, “it’s not one of their top three priorities.”

He also said that even sending older models of F-16s would be costly, totalling $2 billion to $3 billion for about 36 planes, which would fall short of the 50 to 80 that the Pentagon estimates Ukraine would need to update its existing air force.

“That would consume a huge portion of the remaining security assistance that we have for this fiscal year,” Kahl noted, ticking through the numbers. “These are the trade-offs we are making in real time.”

-New York Times