> >i still get my monthly multi-billion dollar packages in material aid, not money. it's like you guys are literal children who don't understand how military aid works. what would sending over briefcases full of money accomplish? we send missiles, ammunition, tanks, missile platforms, etc. this stuff comes out of pre-existing stockpiles of material, which is why most of it is very old, decades old in fact. a lot of the initial stuff sent to ukraine was actually slated for being recycled, so donating it to ukraine technically saved us money and allowed the weapons to actually serve their originally intended purpose of blowing up russians in a war that america sadly never got to fight itself. where the dollar value comes from is the estimated cost of replacing all the stuff we donated. the stockpiles have to be refilled, after all. but stockpiles don't just magically poof new missiles and tanks into existence, they have to be manufactured, which means... yup, all that money gets funneled into us arms manufacturers! tl;dr we're not "paying" ukraine anything, we're paying our own military industrial complex to manufacture new weapons to replace cold war era weapons we sent to ukraine as a kind of recycling / russian liquidation program.
United States