WTH is Ukraine Aid’s Best-Kept Secret? Most of The Money Stays in the U.S. John Ferrari Explains

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, Government, History, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The best-kept secret about aid to Ukraine? 90% of the money the US allocates for military aid is spent here at home. The money goes right to American defense companies that employ American workers to produce the weapons systems that Ukraine is using to fight Russia. Not only that: the money is revitalizing decayed production lines, bringing back institutional knowledge about weapons manufacturing to the fore, and pushing the American defense sector to innovate and modernize old weapons systems. But this is all being done begrudgingly by the Pentagon and painfully slowly by the Biden admin, and with zero support from several loud voices in the GOP. At a time when the US is facing three major threat environments – Russia-Ukraine, Hamas-Israel, and a future China-Taiwan – why is Congress so confused about the need to rebuild America’s defenses? Why aren’t Congressmen pushing harder for more jobs in their own districts for their own constituents, instead of prioritizing their own isolationist agenda? Bonus: read Marc’s piece in the Washington Post laying out the argument, and the data, for Ukraine aid benefiting the American worker.

John Ferrari is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work focuses on the defense budget, defense reform and acquisition, and the US military. Over his 32-year US Army career, Major General Ferrari, who is now retired, served as the director of program analysis and evaluation, the commanding general of the White Sands Missile Range, a deputy commander for programs at the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, and a strategic planner for the Combined Joint Task Force Seven in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Major General Ferrari has also worked as a branch chief for contingency operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the US Department of Defense and as a program examiner at the Office of Management and Budget at the White House.

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.1	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on.
0:01.0	Who in God's name knows what it's all about.
0:28.9	Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
0:30.4	And I'm Mark Dyson.
0:31.2	Welcome to our podcast.
0:32.6	What the hell is going on?
0:34.4	Mark, other than this horrible cold that I have, what the hell is going on? No, wait, don't tell me. I want to ask you about this piece. No, no, no. We have something else to say first. What? What the hell is going on is we just passed one million downloads of this podcast. Amazing. Thank you every single one of you. We love you all. Every, every downloader. If you had told us when we started this, that a million people would listen to Danny and me rant about the world and bring in interesting people and all the rest that we would have never believed it. Nobody would have ever believed it. You're exactly right. Okay, now can I get to my question for you? Yes, you can. Enough about us. But enough about both of us. Let's talk about you. My favorite topic. Don't we know it? You have a wonderful piece in the Washington Post, and it brings together all of the work that we do at AEI in all of its dimensions. In other words, it's a very
1:31.5	deeply researched piece. Thank you, Clara, as well, and to our GR team, our government
1:36.4	relations team, who really helped on this. You bring together impeccable research, principled
1:43.3	policy recommendations, and a big audience that
1:47.1	is listening to you, I think, on Capitol Hill and in public. You wrote this piece about
1:52.1	how we are not spending for the most part, the money that is going to Ukraine. Oh, my God,
1:58.9	why are we spending all this money in Ukraine? We are spending most of that money in the United States. Explain the piece.
2:03.6	90% of the money is the best kept secret about aid to Ukraine.
2:07.6	90% of the military aid that we provide for Ukraine doesn't go to Ukraine. It stays here in the United States.
2:14.6	It goes to American companies, American factories, American workers,
2:19.0	who are either producing weapons for Ukraine or are producing weapons. After we give weapons
2:25.1	from our stockpiles to the Ukrainians, we backfill and buy new weapons for ourselves.
2:30.9	And it's modernizing our military because we are giving them very often weapons that are decades old that have been sitting in our stockpiles for a long time.
2:40.0	And we replace them with new, modern, advanced versions that are built in 2023 instead of, you know, 2013 or 2003.
2:48.0	We identified, and by the way, I give a shout out to Clara, our producer, who has done amazing research on this, plus Noah Burke in our government relations office together. They identified 117 production lines in 31 states and 71 cities that are producing weapons for Ukraine. That is not only creating jobs, you know, and in this country right now, everybody's
	...

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