Opponents of arming Ukraine as the country battles Russian invaders have argued that the U.S. has literally no oversight of the tens of billions of dollars in financial and military aid being sent to Kyiv, a point that is now being driven home.
In recent days, U.S.-supplied weapons such as the venerable and sophisticated Javelin anti-tank missile have wound up for sale on the dark web, according to The Atlas News, which noted:
Users from Ukraine have posted several American made FGM-148 Javelins for sale on the Dark Web Marketplace, Thief Marketplace. The posting was made less than three hours ago and the seller advertised shipping available from Ukraine, specifically Kyiv. The seller is charging 30,000 USD for what seems to be just the tube. Unseen is the command Launch Unit, and it is unclear if there is a missile in the tube. A full ensemble of the Javelin usually goes for 206K USD, with the Command Launch Unit valued at around 120K USD and each missile at about 80K USD, so this posting is a steal.
The seller, @weapon_ukraine_big_sale, has a number of other U.S.-made weapons systems ranging from Stinger man-portable, shoulder-fired missiles, Phoenix Ghost Drones, and crates of small arms and ammunition, all of which are vitally needed by the Ukrainian military.
So far, the Biden regime and Congress have authorized the Pentagon to ship some 5,500 Javelin tubes to Ukraine as well as an unspecified number of command launch units, necessary for the system to fire. In all, that accounts for at least one-third of all Javelins in the Defense Department's inventory; most that have been sent are being used against Russian armor and other ground vehicles following the Feb. 24 invasion.
The Pentagon’s Javelin stocks are running low and thanks to decades worth of off-shoring U.S. industrial production, combined with the current manufactured supply chain crisis, the U.S. military cannot quickly replace them, according to a leading Republican lawmaker.
In an interview with Fox News, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), said that the regime is dangerously depleting Javelin stocks at a time when more conflicts involving American troops could break out around the world (such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan).
“What’s bad is the president himself seems at times to constantly want to remind everybody what we won’t do and putting arbitrary limits on our assistance, I think, undermines our effort. But, the real ugly is that we are running low in terms of our stockpiles,” he said last month.
“We just burned through seven years of Javelins and that’s not only important as we continue to try and help the Ukrainians win in Ukraine, that’s important as we try to simultaneously defend Taiwan from aggression from the Chinese Communist Party,” he continued.
“They are going to need access to some of these same weapons systems, and we simply don’t have the stockpiles at present in order to backfill what we’ve spent in Ukraine,” he noted further.
Last week, our dementia patient president, Joe Biden, visited the Lockheed Martin plant in Troy, Ala., where the defense company builds Javelins. Lockheed officials said that the company is attempting to increase its workforce in order to crank out more of the missiles, but it is doing so at a time when the labor market is the tightest it has been in decades.
The company did say it still expects to ramp up production in the near term.
Appearing on Face the Nation, Jim Taiclet, the president and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Corporation, said that production of the weapon would double from “2,100 missiles per year” to “4,000 per year,” adding that production “will take a number of months, maybe even a couple of years to get there because we have to get our supply chain to also crank up.”
Not to mention finding enough new workers to build the weapons.
Obviously, the concerns among many American lawmakers that our unmonitored weapons could wind up in the hands of those who seek to harm us have come true.
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