The West is on Ukraine’s side, not just in words. The United States and its European allies are sending weapons to Kiev to help the resistance against a nefarious invasion. The US administration has spoken out in favor of heavy equipment, especially tanks and artillery. At his side are the United Kingdom and the Baltic countries; France, Turkey, Germany are more cautious.
An article in the Corriere della Sera signed by Andrea Marinelli and Guido Olimpio recalls that “it takes between 4 and 6 days to deliver weapons to Ukraine”, as Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed Wednesday. It is a supply chain that works as if it were the logistics of a very common e-commerce, except that it carries Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank Javelin.
US weapons hardly move from American soil: Washington’s army collects stocks in its bases located mostly in Europe and brings all the material to Poland, Romania or Slovakia, in a route that can be up to a thousand kilometers long.
Then you have to cross the border to get to the Ukrainian cities close to the combat zones: «In this case, all the information of the expeditions remains confidential as long as no one finds out. These convoys can be easily identifiable targets by the Russians, therefore they are divided into small shipments », writes the Corriere.
The last mile is clearly the most complicated: the shipments, we read in the article, are divided into even smaller convoys that need further protection, and we rely on intelligence to understand what to ship and to which area. Finally, there is the distribution to individual units, of the army and of the Territorial.
New weapons need knowledge, know-how and awareness of use. As we wrote last month here in Linkiesta, the Ukrainians have shown that they are sufficiently trained to adapt to new equipment quickly. It certainly helped the multi-level reserve system put in place after 2014: the army is supported by the national guard (900 thousand soldiers who have already served in the armed forces, of which 400 thousand in Donbass) and by the territorial guard, thus ensuring that military skills and training were more or less widespread throughout society on the eve of general mobilization. The experience of the 2014-2022 war in the east of the country was also enhanced through new systems to absorb the lessons learned in as many units as possible.
But it’s also true that for the first time last Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted in a House hearing that the Pentagon trains soldiers on American soil to teach them how to use the Switchblade, the disposable drone-kamikaze. crashing into enemy targets.
Prior to this Austin revelation, the only public information about the training of Ukrainian fighters was the training program that the CIA carried out in the European country from 2015 until the Russian invasion, when it evacuated all American personnel.
«Now – reads the Corriere della Sera – the new indication has arrived on the team present in the US. The training program began in the fall and is still ongoing at an unidentified American base in the southern United States. “
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