Hello, my name is Edmund DeMarche. I’m the editor of The Trans Journal. I’m here with Mark Kansian. He is a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, better known as CSIS, in Washington, DC. Mark, thank you for joining The Trans Journal today. Thanks for having me on the show. I just spoke to you briefly off-camera about how I’m interested in how NATO weapons actually get funneled into Ukraine, because since the start of the war, you’ve heard Russia take a position that, you know, these F-16s will be blown up before they even take off from bases, or, you know, saying that, you know, any time NATO, if they start providing long-range missiles, we’ll take them out right away.

I’m curious, and I’ve been curious, how does NATO actually deliver, how do they deliver these weapons into Ukraine, and how do the forces in Ukraine take these weapons without them being intercepted? Well, that’s a well-established logistics pipeline to get equipment and supplies to the Ukrainians. Basically, it’s funneled through bases, particularly one large base, in eastern Poland. And what happens is the United States will ship equipment to a port, either in Poland or in Germany, and then it goes to this forward base. For other NATO countries, they also send it to these bases.

And then it’s put onto railcars and turned over to the Ukrainians, and the railcars take the equipment into Ukraine, and then it’s distributed through the Ukrainian logistics network. Along the way, there are procedures for making sure that the equipment is turned over, that we know exactly what was turned over, that the Ukrainians have received it. There’s a lot of effort, particularly on the large items, to make sure that they don’t get diverted. Now, the Russians have tried to interdict this flow. You may remember, early in the war, they struck several railroad stations, and what they were trying to do was to take out this rail network.

But there are enough rail networks, there are enough alternatives, they could also go by truck, that it has not been possible for Russia to stop this traffic. I think they’ve given up. Now, we’ve seen the war enter a new stage. Trump met with Putin in Alaska. It seems like nothing really solid, or there were no real breakthroughs from that meeting. Trump has been vague about the next steps he’ll take towards the Ukraine war with Russia, if it continues. We saw last night Russia launched another large-scale attack across Ukraine. It actually was criticized by Mark Carney from Canada, who said Russia brutally attacked Ukraine last night, killing innocent civilians in residential areas.

Canada is one of the NATO countries that have been providing Ukraine with weapons. Does NATO have the capacity to confront Russia in Ukraine? Or is that something that’s not possible? Do they have the weapons production capacity to challenge Russia and help Ukraine defend itself in the short term? In the short term, the United States and NATO, along with other global supporters, do have the capability to keep Ukraine supplied with enough equipment and supplies. To continue its resistance. To put the Ukrainians on the counter offensive, as they did two years ago, that takes an awful lot of equipment.

It’s not clear that the United States or the Europeans are willing to step up to that level, or if they have enough equipment on hand, that they could do that. It’s important to keep in mind that there are two ways of getting equipment to Ukraine. One is to send equipment that has already been produced and is in US or NATO stockpiles. That can arrive very quickly, and then funding provides a backfill, although there’s a gap of two, three, four years before the backfill arrives. The other way is for Ukraine to sign contracts for equipment to be produced.

The United States has been doing that since the beginning of the war. The problem is it takes about 42 months for all of that equipment to be delivered. In other words, from the time that the United States announces that Ukraine is going to receive this money to buy equipment from the United States, and the time when the last bit of that equipment arrives, because it has to be manufactured, takes about 42 months. It’s not a very good mechanism for getting material there very quickly, although material from the very beginning of the war, that was contracted for, is now arriving.

Do you think NATO and the United States, do you think they have good plans in place to help Ukraine? They have that new procedure where European countries will buy and purchase US weapons in part of a deal to make Trump feel better about supporting Ukraine, that would send weapons from the US and paid for technically by Europe. Do you think that is a good procedure and policy that’s in place right now that gives Trump some political coverage for his base, or at least his supporters that wanted it meant to Ukraine and didn’t like seeing billions of weapons being sent there? Do you think that this will be a benefit to Ukraine, this plan? And does the US even have the production capabilities to provide a substantial amount of weapons to Ukraine in any kind of significant time? Well, it is a good plan, because as you point out, the Trump administration came into office expressing a lot of skepticism about support to Ukraine.

There have been many in the White House and in the Trump circle, particularly the Vice President, who had said that they didn’t spend any more money on supporting Ukraine, that the United States had spent too much, that it had been unfair because Europeans hadn’t done enough, that Ukraine was corrupt for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, the President has always seen arms sales as an expression of manufacturing and strengthening the US economy. So he’s been willing to be forward leaning in selling weapons to allies and partners. So the deal that the NATO Secretary General made with President Trump was that the Europeans would buy equipment from the United States and send that to Ukraine.

President Trump was very happy with that arrangement because he saw this as helping the United States economically. And the other elements of the administration who were skeptical about supporting Ukraine were willing to go along with it, since he and ISIS wasn’t putting any money in. Your CSIS just recently released a report and it said that the governments for 32 members of NATO, they announced they’ll invest 5% of their GDPs in their own domestic weapon productions. And it could be worth $1.4 trillion over the next, I guess, maybe 10 years or so. Is this something that you see as a, will Russia watch this and not increase its own weapons production? Is this just a slippery slope that’ll just keep a weapons race going between Europe and Russia? Is it assumed that that European country, that Russia will just sit back and watch these European countries develop more weapons based on the threat from Russia? Or do you think Russia will counter by also intensifying its weapons production? The challenge that the Europeans face is that Russia has already increased its weapons production.

It has probably about doubled its military budget in order to fight the war. So the Europeans are looking at a Russia that is now spending much more on defense. It’s expanded its defense industry, is expanding its armed forces. So this was their response in addition to decades of the US hectoring the Europeans to do more for defense. It is important to keep in mind exactly what this 5% is. This is 3.5% that will be spent on military forces and industry. So these funds will support the regular armed forces, will arm them, will pay service members and training and that sort of thing.

And that, if they actually come through with it, would be a great increase because most of the Europeans have now reached the 2% goal, but stretching to 3.5% would be quite an increase. The other 1.5% is supposed to be spent on related activities. And what those related activities are is left a bit vague. I think most of them will be civil projects that could be used to help military operations, investments in railroads, maybe investments in some airports, maybe some in defense industry, but it’s not going directly into the military. Does Ukraine have more of a weapons problem or manpower problem right now? Do you see Ken, NATO’s weapons and promises for weapons? Is that Ukraine’s biggest lift and challenge or is it putting men and soldiers on the ground against Russia? Well, both are challenges for Ukraine.

On the equipment, they’ve received a lot of equipment from the United States, NATO and other supporters. They’re fairly well equipped, but every military in combat could use more equipment because every day of combat chews up supplies and weapons get destroyed and munitions get used. So they could manpower is very short in Ukraine. They’re a smaller country than Russia. They’ve had to mobilize more of their population. They’re taking a lot of casualties. There was need to be replaced every day. They’ve also made some unusual decisions. Their draft age starts at, I think, now 25.

Most countries have a draft at 18. If the Ukrainians did that, they could open up a lot, larger pool of manpower. The problem is that they feel that they would be using their youth and they want to preserve their young people. So they’re sending much older personnel into the military. That’s very unusual. So they have some resources they could use, but it gets more and more politically difficult. One of the things that the Trends Journal, my magazine we reported on, is how Ukraine has changed the face of war and how AI and drone technology really has become a prominent fixture on the battlefield.

How do you see even US weapons production changing after watching what happened in Ukraine? And I know this has some ramifications even in Taiwan and how they’re watching this closely to see how they would go up against a much larger army in China potentially. Do you see this war as the beginning of a real embrace for drone and AI warfare? Or is it still something that you see that munitions and artillery play a very important role? And we’ve seen Russia have the upper hand throughout the war here. What would you say if you had to analyze and say what you’ve learned from the Ukraine war in weapons production? What would you say you learned? One of the big things is drones, as you point out.

Those have become ubiquitous on the front lines used very extensively. They’re used in a way that the United States didn’t really expect before the war. When you talk to the United States about drones, we were thinking of weapons like Predator and Reaper. Those were widely used during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have a lot of endurance. They can carry a lot of weapons, but they’re slow and easily shot down. And that’s what was found in the war. Those weapons, the weapons the United States had expected to be used extensively were not.

And it’s these first person viewer drones that the United States really had none of before the war that have taken on a major role. Ukrainians go through something like half a million a year, maybe as many as a million, tens of thousands every day. So they have become, as I say, ubiquitous. They’re almost like artillery shells. That is, they’re only used once or twice. Then they’re shot down or they hit their target or something like that. They are not really aircraft because they don’t typically come back very often. But that has had a major effect on the way people think about future warfare.

On the other hand, when you look at the front lines, it looks a lot like World War I. Artillery is still very important. The infantry is critical digging into its trenches and its static warfare. Again, like the Western Front in World War I, a lot of questions about what might happen if there were maneuver restored to the battlefield. So a lot of questions. I think that the immediate thing that the United States and many countries are focusing on are these first person drones and then looking at other possible technologies. I’d note also that AI, which receives a tremendous amount of attention, really hasn’t been a tool for the future and not one that’s on the battlefield in volume currently.

Now to just shift a little bit to speaking about weapons and the amount of weapons the U.S. has, we saw the conflict and the war with Iran recently where the U.S. defended Israel from a lot of missile strikes from Iran. We shot a lot of missiles, anti-missiles, to intercept these things and now we’re doing assessments on how many we have and what we look like as our stockpiles. Did that teach the U.S. anything about being able to sustain any kind of a very long war? Because the war with Iran didn’t last that long and the U.S.

really did, from what I read, burned up a lot of missiles in the defense of Israel. Is that something? Can the U.S. actually, a lot of critics say the U.S. doesn’t have the capacity, the weapons capacity, traditionally the conventional weapons, to sustain a long war against either China or Russia. Do you share that opinion or are we in better position than some of these analysts think? Well, there’s no question that before the war the United States was in a very weak position. We had assumed that wars would be short, our inventories reflected that, and we had shaped our defense industrial base for efficient peacetime production, not for wartime surge.

One of the things we’ve seen with the war in Ukraine is how important that industrial surge is. The United States is putting a lot of money into certain kinds of weapons, artillery, ammunition, for example, to increase production. That’s been true of the Red Sea and the defense of Israel. The United States has fired many missiles. I think in the course of a week we fired a year’s worth of production. Those missiles are now being replaced. They’re increasing the production lines. But the problem is that no matter how big your inventory is, it’s never going to be enough for a really long war.

We may be able to support a war that goes, say, eight weeks instead of three or four weeks, and that’s a great improvement. But for really long wars, many months or even years, the industrial base has to be able to turn very quickly to surge production. The United States is thinking about that, also thinking about alternative acquisitions that might be produced more easily, but we’re still at the beginning of figuring out what to do. My last question. I know you don’t have all day to talk. I appreciate you joining us, Mark Hanson, with CSIS.

My last question is Taiwan. You wrote about Taiwan recently in Newsweek magazine, and here’s what you wrote. You wrote, the United States needs allies and partners to fight China successfully if there was a war. Indeed, extensive CSIS war gaming shows that the US would lose without allies around China. Can you talk about what that war would look like? And one of the main issues that I’ve heard about is how the US would even get assets around China to come to the defense of Taiwan. Am I wrong to say that China could take Taiwan whenever it wants and the US really wouldn’t be able to stand up to it or allies in the region? Right now, if China today decided to go to retake Taiwan, would the US or allies be able to put up any kind of significant defense for Taiwan today? We could put up a very robust defense of Taiwan.

The critical element for allies and partners is Japan because the United States has many bases in Japan. Those bases are close to Taiwan, and we absolutely have to have access to those bases to defend Taiwan. Fighters like the F-35, the F-22, F-15s, they don’t have the range to operate further away, for example, from Guam. So the United States needs access to bases that are close that it could operate out of. And our belief is that we would have access to those bases in Japan. Japanese officials have indicated that that would be the case, but it’s absolutely critical.

The Philippines could help. The bases in range are not as well developed, and the relationship is not as close, but it’s getting much closer. That could be a substitute, but those allies and partners are absolutely critical. Now, with those allies and partners, the United States can move its immense air fleets close to Taiwan and contest any Chinese invasion, and we believe successfully. But we have to have access to that basing and the allies and partners. One of the challenges is that our trade policy is conflicting with our national security policy. That is, we are levying heavy tariffs on countries like Japan, whom we need desperately for our position in the Western Pacific.

Has Trump proven to European officials that he is still a reliable ally? I know Frederick Mers from Germany, when he first took office earlier this year, he said, we need to ramp up production because the US is no longer an ally that we could depend on. Has Trump, in your view, proven to Europeans that he will continue to be an ally that’s dependable in the future? It’s hard to say since this administration has really just begun, but there’s no question that the Trump administration has planted seas of doubt in allies and partners about whether the United States would come to their aid in time of crisis, what kind of conditions the United States might put on that aid.

So given that seed of doubt, allies and partners are ramping up their own national defense. Mark Hanson from CSIS, thank you so much for joining the Trend Journal today. Thanks for having me on the show. [tr:trw].

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