POTATUS and his presidential drawdowns are going to be the death of us. Not because he has them, mind you, but because he raids them like a methhead hits Mountain Dew – he can’t stop himself. Be it our dwindling petroleum reserves, or just another shipment of goodies to Ukraine – DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE – old boy’s in the presidential grab bags, pulling out goodies left and right.

As of last Thursday, you can add another recipient to the largesse, and this one normally wouldn’t be on the emergency charity list, to begin with.

Here's the emergency authority under which Biden has been expediting arms to Ukraine since August 2021, and under which he'll now be expediting arms to Taiwan. COVID might be over, but it's still governance by emergency decree pic.twitter.com/g2KYU8YoLO

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 11, 2023

TAIWAN?! Don’t they have lots of stuff already with which to protect themselves, with more inbound all the time?

You’d think so, but actually, no, they don’t. Hence DoD is using the emergency authorization route to get materiel flowing to the island in the face of the recent, aggressive Chinese saber rattling and stalled budget talks.

The Defense Department wants to take full advantage of the authorities Congress recently granted to transfer arms to Taiwan, but first it needs the lawmakers who control the purse strings to follow through with hard cash.

Congress greenlighted $3 billion in total annual military aid to Taiwan as part of the fiscal 2023 defense authorization bill through accounts managed by both the Pentagon and the State Department. But for the most part, Congress did not approve funding for those authorities in its FY23 spending bill. In recent weeks, senior Pentagon officials have started calling on congressional appropriators to allocate the funding they require to begin using Taiwan military aid authorities.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 28 that the Pentagon intends to use a $1 billion authorization to transfer weapons to Taiwan via presidential drawdown authority — the same mechanism the Biden administration has used to transfer equipment to Ukraine. He noted that the administration would put forth a funding request to backfill weapons systems sent to Taiwan under presidential drawdown.

Behind all the obvious immediate problems DoD, Biden and the Taiwanese are scrambling to address at the moment is the underlying story of what has gone wrong with Taiwanese weapons procurement. From Taipei’s perspective, I’m sure they thought they were doing everything proactively to defend their island in real-time, with the best they could buy. It wasn’t that they hadn’t ordered the weapons systems, even forked over the big bucks for them.

It’s that they never came.

Taiwan’s been waiting on a bought-and-paid-for $19B+ weapons backlog since 2019 from manufacturers in the U.S. As of a year ago, thanks to pandemic-created acquisition problems, critical defensive product deliveries were so delayed, congressmen were raising concerns, especially in light of the burgeoning weapons transfers to Ukraine.

… Rep. Steve Chabot, the top Republican on the House’s Asia and Pacific panel, told Defense News that the Foreign Affairs Committee held a meeting to discuss the backlog last week.

“We need to make sure that we provide Taiwan with the assistance that they need as well so that they’re not vulnerable to the [People’s Republic of China],” the lawmaker from Ohio said. “Obviously Ukraine is in the limelight right now — and rightfully so — but we best not forget about Taiwan because China’s actions have been more and more provocative.”

Defense News has obtained a spreadsheet detailing the backlogged equipment, which includes Taiwan’s $8 billion purchase of 66 F-16 fighter jets as well as $620 million to replace expiring components of its Patriot missile system.

The delayed deliveries also consist of smaller, asymmetric weapons systems Washington believes would be useful in deterring and thwarting a potential Chinese invasion. China considers the self-governing island a rogue province and has promised to bring it back under Beijing’s control, by force if necessary.

Those asymmetric weapons include Stinger missiles, heavyweight torpedoes, high-mobility artillery rocket systems, Paladin howitzers, MS-110 reconnaissance pods and a field information communications system. They also include $2.37 billion in Harpoon Block II surface-launched missiles and $1 billion in air-launched SLAM-ER missiles.

Here we are a year later, and nothing has changed. In fact, the subject of the backlog came up during the visit the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen, had with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a bipartisan group of Congressmen at the Reagan Library.

… Seth Moulton [D-MA]: Presenting a bipartisan front at a time when admittedly, there is a lot of partisanship in American politics is important for our allies to see. It’s important for adversaries like China to see as well.

Daniella Cheslow[WSJ reporter]: Behind closed doors, Moulton says they talked about building up economic ties. President Tsai also asked the US to speed up the delivery of weapons to Taiwan. There’s a $19 billion backlog of US weapons. Recently, the US approved Taiwan for more military financing for buying weapons. Moulton says he would like to do more.

Helping finance something that never arrives isn’t actually helpful.

…The delay in the delivery of the Harpoon coastal defense system and associated missiles to Taiwan is a perfect example. The sale was announced in 2020, but delivery may not be complete until 2029, barring urgent intervention.

Even more embarrassing is that more than 200 Javelin missiles and launchers and 250 Stinger systems were approved for sale to Taiwan in 2015 and have not been delivered. Given the need to supply Ukraine and restock U.S. and allied inventories, it is not realistic to expect them before 2026 or 2027. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency that runs the arms sales process for the Pentagon issues world class press releases to announce sales but, despite individual staff efforts, the agency’s ability to deliver those capabilities at the speed of relevance is something less than world class. Congress’ attention and oversight can help.

I mean, dear God – it’s as if the U.S. is running one of those Facebook ad schemes where you order the $1K “Balsam Hill” Christmas tree on clearance for $99. Your money disappears and no tree arrives (and not saying how I know…).

The other elephant in the room is our tenuous state of munitions stores and dire replacement production. We are giving away things we cannot replace with any consistency or speed for our own stores, less mind supply the Ukrainians’ wholesale war against Russia. I wrote about what this willy-nilly drawdown was doing last month. For all the cheerleading “it’s just spare and old stuff/we can replace it” – no. For the thousandth time, no – we cannot. We do not have the capacity to supply our own needs in peacetime, less mind Ukraine’s in the middle of a conflict and now Taiwan’s?

The United States is set to face a raft of consequences if urgent measures are not taken to expand its production capacity for military munitions.

For many years, the Defense Department and Congress together all but ignored the issue. Year after year, budgets were proposed and approved that saw crucial munitions purchased at the lowest possible rate companies could sustain, hollowing out the industrial base.

…To begin to understand the challenge, consider the U.S. assistance provided to Ukraine. On Oct. 4, the Pentagon announced $625 million in additional security assistance for Ukraine, bringing the total to $17.5 billion since January 2021. Among other things, according the Pentagon, assistance provided to Ukraine by the U.S. has included roughly 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems, 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 880,0000 155mm artillery rounds, 2,500 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds and an unknown quantity of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System rounds used by the 38 U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems in or on their way to Ukraine.

While the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine represents a necessary step to secure core American interests, the laudable provision of these weapons to Kyiv has highlighted shortcomings when it comes to the Pentagon’s munitions arsenals and the capacity of the U.S. industrial base to produce them.

The Javelin anti-tank weapon that gained increased notoriety in the early days of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the wider problem. According to Pentagon budget documents, the average rate of Pentagon procurement of the Javelin during fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2022 was about 675 annually. At that rate, it would take more than 12 years to replace the 8,500 Javelin systems sent to Ukraine.

In April, when the United States had sent only 5,000 Javelin missiles to Ukraine, lawmakers expressed concerns that this quantity amounted to one-third of U.S. stockpiles.

People have no concept – there isn’t a military Sam’s Club where this stuff is on a shelf, and you plop what you need in a cart or order replacements from Amazon. Think about that. A year ago, April 2022 – we had already sent Ukraine ONE-THIRD of the Javelin missiles in OUR inventory and how long it takes to replace them.

Now think about the bought and paid for Javelins the Taiwanese have yet to receive since 2015. When do they get those? I’ll bet they were happy the Ukrainians were gifted thousands of them and they should be legitimately shaking the trees, “Where are ours?!”

See the hurt locker we’re all heading for? Or at least I hope you do.

Sen Josh Hawley’s been sounding the alarm for quite some time.

…“If we only send a few more weapons, a few more billion or maybe it’s a few more $100 billion, then we’ll really have a stable rules-based international order. Maybe we should do some more nation building. Maybe we can even force regime change in Russia,” Hawley said. “All ideas that the uni-party is excited about. All ideas that are nonsense. They’re the wrong ideas at the wrong time.”

“We should’ve seen the threat from China coming years ago, but the uni-party didn’t, and they still aren’t taking it seriously. Right now, we have leaders on both parties, former NATO brass telling us that defending Ukraine is basically the same thing as deterring China,” he said.

…As Napoleon once said to have remarked, ‘If you want to take Vienna, take Vienna.’ If you want to deter China in Asia, deter them in Asia.

Hawley said the U.S.’ “actions in Ukraine are directly affecting our ability to deter our most pressing adversary: that is China in the Pacific.”

We have to make that pivot to China and we have to make that commitment to re-energizing our military-industrial manufacturing base.

It can be done, but Congress will have to be light on its feet to get it moving and determined enough to wear its hard hats when the rotten fruit starts flying from the usual suspects.

But it has to be done.

The giveaways are unsustainable.