Stephen Parker, Boeing’s interim president and chief executive officer, told reporters at the Paris Air Show there had been “no impact at all” on the firm’s assignment of transforming a pair of 747-8 aircraft into VC-25B Air Force One planes.

At a press conference, Parker largely managed to sidestep the hot potato that is the controversial Qatari gift to Trump, saying Boeing was instead “laser focused” on achieving the requisite safety and other certifications of the two aircraft for which the company is on the hook.

Trump’s surprise focus on using a Qatari-donated jet for the presidential transport aircraft has sparked multiple controversies, including concerns about the feasibility of quickly adapting it for presidential use, its cost and the possible impropriety of accepting such a gift.

Boeing has been working on the VC-25B program for about a decade, but the planes have repeatedly fallen behind schedule amid supply chain issues and a lack of properly cleared workers. They were originally expected for delivery in 2024 but now are not expected to be done until 2029 — or earlier if the Air Force scales back on the program’s requirements. Trump has repeatedly voiced his displeasure with Boeing’s delays.

A number of details about the status and terms of the gift fro Qatar, and how the plane would be adapted, remain unknown.

The Pentagon on May 21 announced that it had accepted the aircraft. But a week later, The Washington Post reported the agreement for the transfer had not yet been finalized.

A contentious exchange over the Qatar plane developed between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., during a June 11 Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. Hegseth first said he could not provide specifics about a potential Air Force One in the public hearing, before acknowledging a memorandum of understanding with Qatar over the jet had not yet been signed.

Also unanswered at the Paris Air Show were questions regarding a potential role for Boeing in refitting the Qatari 747, a plane fashioned to be a flying palace rather than the airborne command-and-control center that Air Force One is supposed to be.

“We’ll support the president in any way,” Parker said.

L3Harris may have a role in adapting the Qatari plane, according to a Wall Street Journal report in May. L3Harris has declined to comment.

The Air Force on May 21, following the Pentagon’s premature announcement of the acceptance of the Qatar plane, said it was preparing to award a contract to convert the 747-8 into an Air Force One.

Multiple Democratic lawmakers have voiced their displeasure to Hegseth over his refusal to detail matters such as cost and timing of the modification work.

And some lawmakers, including Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., have also blasted Trump’s plans to transfer the jet to his presidential library toward the end of his administration, saying it would be a waste of money to so heavily modify an aircraft that would only be used for a limited time.

Some experts have warned adapting a jet from Qatar — even a free one — into Air Force One would cost at least $1 billion to add self-defense capabilities and countermeasures, encrypted communications and command-and-control capabilities that would allow the president to direct U.S. forces in a catastrophic emergency.

In a June 5 hearing, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink estimated it would cost less than $400 million.

Speaking ahead of a June 4 meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels, Pistorius said the scope and timing of a potential Russian counterattack was still unclear. Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov was expected to brief allies about options at the gathering, he added.

“We can only speculate about what the Russian forces and Putin are willing and able to do,” the German defense minister told reporters, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I believe the Ukrainians are well prepared, in part thanks to the support they are getting from us.”

Ukrainian forces orchestrated a daring series of drone attacks on June 1 against Russian warplanes of types previously used to launch missiles into Ukraine from great distances.

Officials in Kyiv have said more than 41 Russian military aircraft were destroyed in the attack, a claim that Western news agencies have been unable to verify so far.

Satellite imagery showed seven destroyed aircraft — at least three Tu-95 long-range bombers and four Tu-22Ms — at an air base in eastern Siberia alone, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Russian commanders have used the aircraft, combined with shorter-range attack drones, to strike civilian targets in Ukraine in an effort to grind down the population’s morale, according to Pistorius.

Western military officials have started drawing their own lessons from the Ukrainian surprise attack, dubbed “Operation Spiderweb” by Kyiv.

“This shows us that seemingly impenetrable locations maybe are not,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said in Washington on Tuesday. “We need to pay more attention to that.”

The idea that high-tech warplanes, concentrated on vulnerable air bases, pose an achilles heel in U.S. war plans has been percolating in Air Force circles for some time.

Yet after more than a decade of research, lead nations Germany and the Netherlands are still years away from fitting their navies with a hard-kill torpedo countermeasure.

Germany’s navy has been toying with a product called SeaSpider, developed by Atlas Elektronik, for several years. Work on the sole technology option under consideration in Europe goes back even further, with engineers studying it for at least 15 years, according to the firm’s website.

But while Atlas has tried to market the system as ready for combat, no navy has yet taken the bait, and the Dutch Ministry of Defence has repeatedly pushed back the start of a formal purchasing program based on SeaSpider.

The German sea service did tests some years ago, but decided against adopting the system. And the Canadian navy, deemed a prospective SeaSpider launch customer due to the timing of its large-scale surface combatant program, made no mention of the capability in its initial lineup of technologies for the future fleet.

A spokesman for Atlas’ parent company, Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems, declined to discuss SeaSpider, pointing to previous requests by the German navy to keep details under wraps. A spokeswoman for the German Ministry of Defense said the technology’s classification and contractual status prohibit the disclosure of details.

Still, officials in Berlin believe that a capability to intercept torpedoes with torpedoes is a critical force-protection technology in principle, the spokeswoman told Defense News.

Torpedoes have historically been one of the main threats to surface vessels, with the weapon involved in more than half of sinkings of U.S. Navy ships during World War II, according to U.S. Coast Guard data cited by Dutch researchers at TNO, a government-linked research organization.

Defense against torpedoes remains essentially a losing proposition, according to experts, leaving surface ships relatively vulnerable once such a weapon is headed their way. The main defensive measures consist of maneuvering, or launching decoys to confuse incoming torpedoes. Yet the latter is ineffective against so-called wake-homing variants, which align their travel path to hit ships in a straight line from behind, their sonar signature buried in the acoustic noise of a ship’s own propulsion system.

The U.S. Navy experimented with an anti-torpedo interceptor installed on three of its aircraft carriers in 2017, before uninstalling the system in 2018, saying that while the hard-kill measure showed “some capability to defeat an incoming torpedo,” reliability was uncertain and lethality of the system was untested.

SeaSpider can intercept all types of torpedoes, combining data from sensors installed on the carrier ship and the interceptor torpedo to compute collision paths with the inbound weapon, the manufacturer promises on its website.

The package has been in play again since last year for further development under the auspices of a European Union program, led by Germany and the Netherlands, labeled simply “Anti-torpedo Torpedo,” or ATT.

A one-sentence description for the project on an EU website describes a desire for “bringing a developed anti-torpedo torpedo demonstrator to the production-ready design, with a qualified effector and a proven functional chain,” an apparent reference to the Atlas product that only the Dutch Ministry of Defence would confirm to Defense News.

A spokesperson there said the SeaSpider technology is still too immature to warrant setting up a formal program, though Dutch defense officials have planned to take such a step, which requires parliamentary notification, since 2022. If it all comes to pass, perhaps in 2025, budget analysts have slotted a torpedo-killing torpedo capability into a category of programs consuming anywhere between €250 million and €1 billion, according to the Dutch MOD.

That is in addition to a related effort, led by TNO and estimated at €50 million to €100 million, to sharpen the technology for torpedo detection that would go into an eventual anti-torpedo torpedo suite, a spokesperson told Defense News.

Notably, the German MOD declined to disclose even the industry team of Atlas and TNO as lead companies of the European Union program, set up under the bloc’s defense-cooperation push known as PESCO. A spokeswoman in Berlin said no contracts had been signed in the matter.

Also unanswered were questions about the shortcomings that the German navy sees in SeaSpider. Defense News has learned that the depth of the envisioned intercept sequence is at issue, with the Atlas system currently limited to hits around the water surface.

In the end, the timing of a European anti-torpedo torpedo program could line up with Dutch Navy plans for new anti-submarine warfare frigates, the first of which is expected to become operational in 2029. That is because German officials expect the PESCO program to yield a production-ready system that passes all regulatory requirements by the end of the decade, with a prototype built in 2028.

In the meantime, other European nations also have taken an interest, including Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Italy and Spain, according to issue experts.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris contributed to this report.

The German vessel, newly arrived in the theater of operations, fired two Standard Missile-2 interceptors at the U.S. drone, but both missed, as German military news website Augengeradeaus first reported.

The attempted shoot-down came after a query with nearby allies about the status of the drone, which flew without a transponder turned on that would allow coalition forces to identify it as friendly, according to the report.

“We can confirm that a U.S. MQ-9 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was targeted in the Red Sea Feb. 27,” a U.S. defense official told Defense News, adding that the aircraft was undamaged and continued its mission.

“CENTCOM is in close coordination with the EU and Operation Aspides to investigate the circumstances that led to this event and to ensure safe deconfliction of airspace,” the official added, using shorthand for U.S. Central Command, the command overseeing American operations in the Middle East.

Germany’s air defense frigate Hessen received parliamentary approval to partake in the European Union’s Operation Aspides last week while already underway to the Red Sea. It is joining a collection of allied warships organized under the EU auspices or the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect marine traffic in the vital cargo route from drone and missile attacks by the Yemen-based Houthi militia.

The group’s fighters are targeting civilian ships claiming support for Hamas in its war against Israel.

A German military spokesman declined to comment on the incident, pointing instead to comments by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Feb. 27 in which Pistorious confirmed the downing of two hostile drones and two failed attempts to intercept an additional, unspecified aircraft.

The novelties come as arms manufacturers tune their lineups to the immediate experience of the brutal, close-range fighting in Ukraine, a trend on display at the DSEI defense trade show held last week in London.

Germany’s Rheinmetall, for example, is reviving a Cold War concept of bouncing mines in its proposed Area Defence Weapon. The system, which resembles a small beer keg sitting on radial stabilizers, uses a combination of sensors to verify that a tank is passing by only to launch itself into the air and drill a 155-millimeter artillery munition into the vehicle’s topside on the way down.

The company said the weapon, ready for use in a few years, could be used in combination with traditional anti-tank mines, where the ADW munition goes after mine-clearing vehicles to keep adversaries’ armored columns from advancing through mined areas.

The re-emergence of mine warfare brings to mind the situation on the frontlines of Ukraine’s defense against Russia, described in a recent Washington Post report as the world’s most mine-contaminated piece of land.

Rheinmetall, for its part, doesn’t refer to the Area Defence Weapon as a mine because the units can be turned off remotely or be programmed to let friendly forces through, with a human operator involved in the process of arming the system.

“Battlefield barriers, and anti-tank mines in particular, have been taken out of commission by NATO forces almost completely since the end of the Cold War,” a company representative explained. “The re-building of that capability is currently the subject of analyses and concepts.”

Meanwhile, Finnish company Insta is throwing its Steel Eagle shrapnel-throwing drone into the ring for meeting a Ukrainian need for killing large numbers of foot soldiers on the open battlefield with fewer scarce munitions fired as they repel Russian invaders and take back territory.

The quadcopter drone carries a fragmentation charge, which notably started its developmental life as a bouncy mine à la ADW, over infantry positions, shredding fighters with 3,000 projectiles so forceful they even penetrate thin armor, according to the company.

Steel Eagle can spray an area as large as a third of a soccer pitch with enough fragments that every square meter will get an average of one-and-a-half projectiles. The drone can also programmed to fall down to a low altitude right before exploding for a denser spray, Tuure Lehtoranta, a vice president at Insta’s defense unit, told Defense News.

Ukrainian officials have been pleading with Western allies for controversial cluster munitions that deal a similar effect, with the United States agreeing this summer to deliver some of the Pentagon’s old stocks.

According to videos circulated on social media, frontline troops have used drones to drop grenades on Russian soldiers, an effect that Lehtoranta said is too “pointed” for the kind of mass punch envisioned by Ukrainian commanders.

The company says its primary target is equipping its home forces of Finland with the Steel Eagle capability.

“There is interest not limited to Finland,” the executive said.

His comments, made ahead of a major announcement about the U.S.-U.K.-Australian submarine partnership dubbed AUKUS, reveal how Washington views its future relationship with Australia as a key foothold in closer proximity to rival China.

Bloomberg reported earlier this week President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are expected to address the way ahead in the pact on March 13 in San Diego, California.

With most of the plans for a fleet of nuclear-powered boats for Canberra still up in the air, the U.S. sea service has its eyes on the near-term benefit of being able to base and repair U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines in Australian ports.

Del Toro told Defense News last month AUKUS is all about “being able to repair our submarines much further out, being able to build them in Australia as well, too, and create that much more presence in the Indo-Pacific where we need it the most.”

He later said at the National Press Club “the ability of the United States Navy to be able to do forward-based repair and maintenance is critical to us; it’s part of why we’re actually proceeding down the AUKUS path as well, too, with regards to submarine capability in the future.”

This comes as the U.S. Navy has conducted an auxiliary ship repair in India and is now eyeing yards in the Philippines and Singapore for future Navy ship repair periods, Del Toro said. The United States in February announced an expansion to an agreement with the Philippines that allows for greater access to bases there for training and prepositioning equipment for certain missions like humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

Leaders from the three partner nations are expected to announce next week exactly how they envision the submarine portion of the AUKUS pact; there’s also a separate track for breakthrough technology sharing.

One thing has become clear during the 18-month study phase announced at the pact’s start in September 2021: it could be decades before Australia gets its nuke-powered subs.

Reuters reported Wednesday the eventual submarine design will be British, with U.S. Virginia-class boats intended as gap-fillers until then. Options for operating American submarines entail deploying dual U.S.-Australian crews on American subs and building up to five new boats, officials told the news service.

Lawmakers here have been saying for months the prospect of selling U.S. submarines to Australia will further tax an already-strained industrial base.

House Armed Services Committee Vice Chairman Rob Wittman, R-Va., said March 8 he supports AUKUS, but doesn’t believe the U.S. has the capacity now to fulfill both U.S. and Australian naval requirements. He added that selling the subs would disincentivize Australia from ramping up its own domestic submarine building capacity from scratch.

Wittman said he’d prefer dual U.S.-Australian crews on new Virginia-class subs that can operate in the Pacific. These subs would be jointly tasked by the U.S. and Australian navies and have a U.S. commander and Australian executive officer, he said.

“I don’t have an issue if we go from two submarines to three submarines a year and then we have the ability to produce enough to where we’re going to meet our equipment and we can sell some to the Australians,” Wittman said. “That’s not where we’re at right now.”

The lawmaker was referring to a backlog in Navy submarine production that limits output to less than two per year today. Congress has pushed to increase the rate to three, but companies have said they lack the capacity.

The submarine industrial base is also beset by labor shortages. Following a meeting with the chief executive of sub builder General Dynamics Electric Boat, which is seeking more than 5,000 new hires, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said expanding sub building capacity would require more federal spending on skills training programs.

“I have yet to see a strategy, or a strategy that seems to work,” Blumenthal said of AUKUS.

The U.S. Navy today has 49 attack submarines — three Seawolf-class, 25 Los Angeles-class and 21 Virginia-class — compared to a stated requirement for 66 to 72, according to the most recently released analysis of future fleet needs.

The submarine industrial base had fallen behind in deliveries even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and from April 2020 to February 2022 the industrial base delivered no new submarines to the Navy, compared to the planned two-a-year delivery schedule.

Meanwhile, the British have three nuclear submarine programs in build or design phases, but only one is being touted as a possible participant for AUKUS.

The Dreadnought-class nuclear missile submarines, set to provide the Royal Navy with its nuclear deterrent by the early 2030s, and the new Astute-class attack boats, still in fielding, appear to have been discounted.

The Royal Navy took delivery of the fifth of seven Astute-class boats last month with handover of the final two boats scheduled by 2026.

The replacement for those submarine, eyed for fielding in the 2040s and conceptually dubbed Submersible Ship Nuclear Replacement, is a likely contender for AUKUS, analysts in London say.

Platform builder BAE Systems and nuclear power plant provider Rolls-Royce were each awarded £85 million ($101 million) contracts in September 2021 to start a three-year effort helping define the approach to replacing the Astute boats.

Andrew Chuter in London contributed to this report.

While negotiations over the exact language continue, Austin said the pledge would emerge from a meeting of NATO members at their summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in July. NATO members, he said, are “upgrading our defense plans, putting more forces at higher levels of readiness.”

“In Vilnius, our leaders will agree on a new defense investment pledge to ensure that the alliance has the resources to carry out these new plans,” Austin told reporters after a meeting of NATO defense ministers. “We look forward to working with our valued allies to ensure that we all do even more to invest in our shared security.”

NATO allies agreed in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, to halt the spending cuts they had made after the Cold War and move toward spending 2% of GDP on defense by 2024. That pledge is due next year, and while NATO is working on a new target, some officials said there wasn’t a firm agreement.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday urged the 30 member countries to commit to spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product, or GDP, on defense by a set date. The comments came after Stoltenberg chaired a meeting of NATO defense ministers, where a first high-level discussion on the issue was held.

“What is obvious is that if it was right to commit to spend 2% in 2014, it is even more right now because we live in a more dangerous world,” Stoltenberg said.

“There is a full-fledged war going on in Ukraine, in Europe, and then we see the persistent threat of terrorism and we see also the challenges that China is posing to our security. So it is obvious we need to spend more,” he said.

Only nine countries met the pledge, according to NATO estimates for last year, but 18 have plans to do so. The U.S. spends 3.47% of its GDP on defense, spending more than all other allies combined.

“I think we should move from regarding the 2% as a ceiling, to regard the 2% of GDP as a floor and minimum,” Stoltenberg said. He added that this should not be a “long term perspective” and “that we need immediate commitment to spend 2% as a minimum when we see the needs for ammunition, for air defense, for training, for readiness, for high-end capabilities.”

According to a defense official from a NATO ally in Europe, there was consensus among leaders that 2% is a floor, but it’s unlikely that the Vilnius summit will yield an increase in percentage. Allies may instead agree repeating the 2% pledge, but in stronger terms.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters in Brussels that Berlin would consider the existing pledge as a “base” from which to grow future spending, though details have yet to be agreed within Germany’s coalition government.

Germany’s share of defense spending currently hovers around 1.3% to 1.4%, and the country’s spending profile makes meeting even the existing goal in time doubtful. Expenditures have risen steadily in recent years, to now roughly €50 billion per year, or $53 billion, plus a €100 billion special defense fund created after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The special fund is largely spoken for with big-ticket investments including F-35s and the replenishment of soldier equipment, ammunition and weapon stocks. Analysts have said the base budget, deliberately kept flat while the multiyear special fund is in effect, must also grow to enable a wholesale rejuvenation of Germany’s defense posture.

Discussions about a more significant spending uptick in Germany are always tied to the question of how the country’s defense bureaucracy and industry can translate potentially tens of billions of additional euros into actual capabilities.

While former U.S. President Donald Trump pressed the issue of burden sharing in aggressive terms, the Biden administration has taken a more encouraging tack while also emphasizing NATO unity. President Joe Biden, in a speech at last year’s summit in Madrid, hailed countries by name that were meeting or intending to meet the 2% target.

NATO leaders at the ministerial also discussed plans to implement new stockpile guidelines, aimed at boosting allied arsenals while continuing to fill Kyiv’s. On Wednesday, Stoltenberg said the NATO leaders addressed ways to boost industrial capacity and replenish stockpiles of armaments and munitions sent to Ukraine.

“NATO Allies are providing unprecedented support to help Ukraine push back against Russia’s aggression. At the same time, this is consuming an enormous quantity of Allied ammunition, and depleting our stockpiles,” Stoltenberg said. “Allies agree on the need to work hand-in-hand with the defense industry to ramp up our industrial capacity.”

To that end, the U.S. has been leading talks among NATO’s national armaments directors.

“As we rush to support Ukraine in the critical months ahead, we must all replenish our stockpiles to strengthen our deterrence and defense for the long term,” Austin said.

With reporting by The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON and ROME — Germany’s promise early this year to send tanks to Ukraine marked the country’s latest concession and provided a cap to the gradual escalation in the kind of equipment allies were supplying.

Indeed, when Russia invaded Ukraine last February, its allies resisted pleas for offensive aid and followed a narrow definition of protective equipment. In Berlin, leaders initially shied away from aid that didn’t fit the German definition of “defensive.”

That’s changed, with Germany now pledging to deliver Leopard 2 battle tanks and approving other countries’ requests to follow suit. Chancellor Olaf Scholz also recently authorized supplying infantry fighting vehicles to help push Russian forces out of occupied Ukraine.

The evolving approach fits a conflict as fluid as it is unpredictable.

Now, a collection of Western tank-type vehicles is slated to arrive on the front lines this spring, with training already underway in donor countries. The vehicles carry the hope of enabling battlefield wins for Ukrainian forces that will lead to some kind of war-ending scenario — if the weapons arrive in time.

Scholz has told Tagesspiegel newspaper he wants Russian President Vladimir Putin to answer one question: “How is the world getting out of this terrible situation?”

Defense News spoke with national security analysts, lawmakers and retired officials, asking each how the conflict could end.

Their answers are glum: The war will be expensive, cost lives and likely last at least a few years — or even become interminable. It will tax the American and European defense industries, especially when it comes to munitions, and could cause economic ruin in Russia. All this while the possibility of nuclear escalation remains.

And they said winning will depend on a Congress with the resolve to ensure continued support to Ukraine. But even then, the very concept of victory may be inaccurate, they warned.

“For this year, it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from all — every inch of Ukraine or Russian-occupied Ukraine,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters during a visit to Germany last month. “That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but it’d be very, very difficult.”

Milley has insisted the war will likely end at the negotiating table — at some point. Officials and experts expect a bloody spring, as Russia sends new conscripts to the front line and Ukraine tries to repel an offensive while mounting its own.

As the war enters its second year, the spigot of military aid is still gushing. But industrial capacities are spotty, and nations have started to scrutinize how much equipment they can spare while maintaining their own self-defense requirements and that of NATO.

At the same time, election season in the United States — Ukraine’s most important backer — stands to spur arguments that a war in Europe of unknown duration is a costly nuisance for America.

How long a war?

Asked about the likely duration of the Ukraine war, analysts in the United States and Europe made similar predictions, with timelines running from months to years to “indefinite.”

Yohann Michel, a research analyst in Berlin with the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, anticipates “long months” ahead, while Michael Kofman, the research program director in the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, expects additional years of fighting.

“Wars typically tend to go on longer than people expect or hope, but especially interstate conflicts of this length,” Kofman said. “History tells us that wars which go on this long … are likely to become protracted, lasting several years.”

Perhaps Italian analyst Lucio Caracciolo was the most pessimistic of all. “This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires,” he said.

“It will only stop when Ukraine or Russia or both collapse, since for both sides this is a matter of life or death,” added Caracciolo, the editor of Italian geopolitics publication Limes.

Peter Roberts, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said there are different ways to define the end of a war: “the end of the kinetic phase” versus “the end of a Georgia-style frozen conflict or a Korea-like situation that runs for years.”

“I would love to think the kinetic phase could end in 2023, but I suspect we could be looking at another three years with this scale of fighting,” Roberts said.

Michel added there are as-yet-unknown factors that will determine the end of the conflict.

“Who will be first to launch the next offense? What role will the weather play?” he wondered. “There is the problem of ammunition — the first side to have a shortage will be in trouble. While there has been no real European program to increase production, will Russian stocks be replenished by China?”

And long, exhaustive fighting carries its own risks, according to Benjamin Jensen, a war gaming expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That’s because the longer conflicts last, the more they exhaust finite resources and, hence, the parties are more willing to gamble.

“Even technologically advanced, wealthy states in the Middle East eventually reached a point where they’re lobbing missiles at civilian cities, openly using chemical weapons and fighting in waves — just people rushing across the field getting shot at,” Jensen said.

Either side may act boldly if it winds up on the ropes and needs an exit strategy. Ukraine, Jensen suggested, might try a spectacular special operation to assassinate a Kremlin official, or Russia could decide to use — or simply test — nuclear weapons.

In Jensen’s view, even the collapse of Russia’s conventional force or a traditional Ukrainian victory may not mean the war is over; either could lead to nuclear escalation by Russia.

On the offensive this spring

On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian forces attacked Ukraine without frozen ground to support their armored vehicles, which meant they had to stick to roads, where they stood out as easy targets.

But this winter, they’re expected to launch attacks across open plains, which would be harder to defeat, said Daniel Rice, a former U.S. Army captain who last year became a special adviser to Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian military.

“The worry is that a large Russian offensive action could punch through, and there’s a lot of worry they could take Kyiv,” said Rice, now president of the Thayer Leadership consulting group in West Point, New York. “People are waking up to the reality that you need to give offensive weapons to end this war — at least to win it.”

The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russia’s fighting force.

Ukrainian soldiers will have to learn how to operate and sustain the latest batch of military aid, which includes Marder and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles from Germany and the United States, as well as Challenger 2, Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks from the U.K., Germany and the U.S., respectively. Also in the mix is a pledge from France to ship AMX-10 RC light, wheeled tanks.

“It’s a lot to do in a short period of time,” Rice said. “Just because they have just the right vehicles doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to take a major future offensive action. But … these Ukrainians have surprised the world every time.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, a former commander of the U.S. Army’s maneuver warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia, said Western upgrades offer Ukraine the chance to dominate the close fight with Russian adversaries and conclude the tactical fighting to its advantage.

Russian forces are already trying to slow down tanks in Ukraine with mines, trenches, and pyramidical, concrete “dragon’s teeth,” a type of fortification not seen in combat since World War II. Ukrainian forces, once equipped and trained for combined arms warfare and tank tactics, will be “designed to punch a hole through a defensive network,” Donahoe predicted.

But the sizable swaths of terrain Ukraine wants to liberate will take time, and to even build the necessary forces will take six months, Donahoe estimated.

The recent arms donations — Kyiv still wants fighter aircraft and long-range tactical missiles — are predicated on the assumption they’ll force Moscow to end its invasion and begin negotiations because military costs are too high. That objective has coexisted with an expectation that Putin’s government will probably never stop fighting, as losing the war could spell the end to his political power.

Pressure points

In the course of the past year, Putin’s domestic propaganda strategy has morphed from a message of “fight the Nazis” in Ukraine to “fight the West” there, said Stefan Meister, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War,” he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits.

And the near-total control of information by the government is making dissent difficult. “Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting,” Meister said.

Past attempts to squeeze the will for war out of Moscow economically also didn’t yield the immediate results for which experts hoped. Cracks may begin to appear this year, however.

“The consensus is that ordinary Russians will start feeling it this year,” said Charles Lichfield, an economics and sanctions analyst at the Washington-based Atlantic Council. “But Russians have a huge degree of tolerance for economic pain.”

Moscow has proved resourceful when it comes to building autonomy into critical goods, Lichfield explained. For example, the tactic of repurposing dishwasher electronics for weapons, mocked in the West as a sign of desperation, probably means “somebody thought about that from the beginning,” he said.

One area to watch is Russia’s payment of pensions. An inability to do so could foster economic discontent capable of turning public opinion against the war, Lichfield told Defense News.

“It would have to get pretty bad for the Russians to get there,” he said, adding that there’s no way of knowing how many reserves the government stashed away after years of fat checks from energy sales.

After imposing sanctions and export controls, Lichfield expects the West’s latest economic pressure point — oil price caps — to yield results because the Russian economy is so tightly linked to the energy market.

Which weapons will Washington send?

The United States, as Ukraine’s most important military supporter, remains the center of gravity when it comes to an eventual outcome for the conflict. American leadership has so far been largely united in their support for Kyiv.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expects the war to end at the negotiating table, but said serious diplomacy hasn’t begun because Putin is still clinging to “maximalist” goals.

“The ultimate end to this is the Ukrainians take back as much pre-Feb. 24 territory as they can get, force Putin to the bargaining table, and then ultimately Ukraine would have to compromise somewhat on issues like Crimea and portions of the east and arrange for solid security guarantees going forward,” Smith told Defense News in a phone interview.

“Right now, the Russians are talking about a major offensive in the next four months,” he added. “It seems like the Russians are at least thinking that they have some possibility of succeeding in that effort. I am skeptical.”

For its part, the Biden administration has started deliberations around the thorny question of whether helping Ukraine should entail retaking Crimea, which Russia seized and then annexed in 2014.

“That would be an extraordinarily risky thing to do,” Smith said. “But it’s important to have those conversations. And from what I understand, high levels of our government have talked about it.”

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former National Security Council director for European affairs in the Obama administration, said he “would not encourage Ukraine to seek to reassert control over Crimea by force, simply because the escalation risks are very high.”

“Crimea is of considerable strategic importance to Russia,” Kupchan told Defense News. “It looms large historically. It’s difficult for me to imagine that the Russians would accept complete defeat and expulsion from Crimea.”

But some on Capitol Hill are more bullish about lining up behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s goal of fully restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty over its territory.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., visited Ukraine in January and subsequently told Defense News at a news conference that “the American military has consistently underestimated the Ukrainian fighting ability.”

“Everything I have come to learn about the will and determination of the Ukrainians leads me to conclude retaking Crimea is within reach, and they need the artillery that will enable hitting targets — the sites of missiles destroying infrastructure in Ukraine,” he said.

Blumenthal has joined other lawmakers — particularly pro-Ukraine Republicans — in pushing President Joe Biden to give Zelenskyy most of the weapons he requested, including long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also called for sending long-range missiles to Ukraine alongside advanced Gray Eagle and Reaper drones.

“We should deliver these assets quickly to make an immediate difference on the battlefield,” Wicker said on the Senate floor in January. “In concert with our allies, this approach of ‘more, better, faster’ would give the Ukrainians a real shot at victory.”

While the Biden administration has voiced concerns that sending ATACMS to Ukraine could enable strikes into Russia, potentially escalating the war into a broader conflict with NATO, the Ukrainians could use those long-range missiles to strike Russian launch points on their own territory — including in Crimea.

Smith indicated he disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision not to send long-range missiles, noting every Ukrainian official assured him they would not use them to attack Russia.

But Smith also said ATACMS producer Lockheed Martin no longer makes the missiles, and the U.S. military still needs them in its stockpiles.

“We’re looking at a variety of different options there,” he said. “They’re not currently being made, so it is legitimately a question of readiness on our part and whether we’d have enough to spare. There are discussions about other longer-range munitions.”

The Biden administration earlier this month announced it is sending Ukraine the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb. The GLSDB has a range of up to 93 miles, doubling Ukraine’s strike range. However, that still falls short of the ATACMS, which would allow Ukraine to strike Russian targets about 190 miles away.

The Pentagon declined to say whether the GLSDB will be used to attack Russian targets in Crimea. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington told Defense News that Ukraine would not strike Russian territory with longer-range weapons pledged by the United States.

Future funding

Depending on how long the war lasts, it remains far from certain whether lawmakers will keep funding Ukraine aid packages. Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid.

The undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, told the Senate in January the Biden administration still expects the $45 billion Ukraine aid package Congress passed in December to last through the end of this fiscal year. But the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, warned at the hearing that the current funding level “does not preclude” the administration from needing to request more assistance before the end of September.

While the bipartisan majority of lawmakers support arming Kyiv, 57 Republicans voted against a $40 billion emergency aid supplemental in May. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., made several concessions to those Ukraine aid skeptics to secure the votes to win his protracted speakership battle.

He agreed to a House rules change that would allow any member to initiate a vote to remove him as speaker, forcing him to tread carefully even on issues that enjoy majority Republican support — such as Ukraine assistance.

It took 15 votes for McCarthy to secure the position, after which he appointed three Republicans who oppose Ukraine aid — Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas — to the Rules Committee, which controls legislation and debate on the House floor.

But another McCarthy concession — a procedure allowing 218 members to force a House floor vote on any bill — could present an opportunity for pro-Ukraine Republicans and Democrats to pass additional funding for Kyiv.

Still, the political dynamics may become more complicated in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, as some prominent Ukraine aid opponents, including former President Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have already thrown their hats into the ring or are reportedly considering doing so.

Making weapons

One key question that could determine the war’s end game is how long Ukraine’s backers can keep up their arms donations to Kyiv.

“There’s no such thing as infinite resources,” said Jensen, the CSIS analyst. “Heaven forbid this goes on another year, two years. At some point the fighting will exhaust even the entirety of the Western world’s support for Ukraine.”

While defense spending in the United States and Europe is trending upward, in large part because of Russia’s attack, industrial capacity to crank out weapons and ammunition has emerged as a bottleneck.

In response, companies on both sides of the Atlantic announced plans to restart production lines for artillery shells and other weapons considered somewhat arcane until recently.

Wicker said the fiscal 2023 government funding and defense authorization bills include money to expand munitions manufacturing, “doubling and even tripling production capabilities for weapons like 155mm shells, [anti-tank] Javelins and [the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System].”

Still, it’s an open question whether the U.S. will be able to indefinitely continue its current level of support, said Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser who has studied the volumes of artillery used in the war.

“They’re going through it at phenomenal rates,” he said of the Ukrainian military firing artillery munitions. “The U.S. bins are very low. We’re going to increase production substantially, but it’ll still be way below what the Ukrainians are using.”

Despite pleas from Kyiv, Germany has so far resisted international pressure to provide its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or permit other countries with the tanks, like Poland and Finland, to send them. Ukrainian leaders have said they need modern Western tanks to help repel an expected spring offensive from Moscow’s forces in Russian-occupied territories in the east.

After the meeting of representatives from the 50-plus donor nations, new German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius defended his government’s decision to withhold the weapons for now, but said he has ordered a review of the country’s stocks in case of a change of heart.

“We’re not really hesitating, but we are just being very careful in balancing the pros and cons,” he added. “This is a new kind of measure we would choose.”

Pistorius said there was no unity among representatives about sending Leopard tanks, suggesting even their military utility for the conflict is in dispute. “There is no common opinion” on tank deliveries, said Pistorius. “The impression that there is a firm coalition, with Germany standing in the way, is false.”

The struggle over main battle tanks comes as the U.S. and other allies of Ukraine are ramping up support for Ukraine to include armored vehicles, advanced air defenses like Patriot and other weapons they previously denied to Kyiv. The aid reflects a fear the conflict could turn into a grinding war of attrition unless Ukrainian forces have the tools they need to turn the tide.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who had pressed Berlin for a decision, told reporters after Friday’s meeting that Germany is still a leader in the effort and a reliable ally. He pointed to Berlin’s provision of armored vehicles, air defenses and training for Ukrainian forces — and downplayed the tank issue, saying the effort “isn’t really about one single platform.”

“They are a reliable ally, and they’ve been that way for a very, very long time, and I truly believe that they’ll continue to be a reliable ally going forward,” Austin said. “Not to mention Germany is host to 39,000 of my troops and their families, and also 10,000 civilians here.”

America’s latest package of aid totals $2.5 billion and includes Stryker armored vehicles for the first time. The eight-wheeled, 20-ton Stryker has been in U.S. arsenals for more than 20 years and carries nine infantrymen and two crew.

The U.S. package includes 90 Strykers, another 53 Bradley fighting vehicles, 350 Humvees, 53 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, more than 100,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and rockets, and missiles for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. It also provides eight Avenger air defense systems and more NASAMS munitions, aimed at countering a range of short- and medium-range threats.

Pistorius said his country’s new aid package would amount to more than €1 billion, or $1.1 billion, bringing Berlin’s Ukraine contributions to a total of €3.3 billion so far. Germany this spring plans to send roughly 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles, a Patriot air-defense fire unit, additional IRIS-T air-defense units, Gepard air-defense tanks and fresh ammunition for those weapons.

Other pledges announced ahead of the Ramstein meeting included S-60 anti-aircraft guns with 70,000 rounds of ammunition from Poland, additional Stinger air-defense systems and two M-17 helicopters from Latvia, and two Russian-made Mi-8 helicopters and dozens of L-70 anti-aircraft guns with ammunition from Lithuania.

All eyes were on Germany ahead of the meeting, whose Leopards exist in most European countries’ armed forces, with tank-support advocates hoping for an announcement to “#FreeTheLeopards,” as a hashtag created by a raucous military Twitter crowd fueling the debate proposes.

Pistorius said the German defense ministry is evaluating how many Leopards Berlin could deliver, with an eye on different configurations and compatibility with allies in an eventual deployment, Pistorius said.

He left open the question of when officials would make a decision.

Pistorius said countries that had offered to send their own Leopards were free to undertake similar prep work for a potential deployment.

Berlin must approve the export of German-made weapons. The prospect of nations bypassing Germany’s approval, as reports from Poland suggested, did not come up at the meeting, Pistorius added.

The United Kingdom announced last week it would send Challenger 2 tanks, describing it as a natural progression of military aid to Ukraine.

The U.S. has so far declined to provide M1 Abrams tanks. Pentagon officials view the Leopards as the most immediately accessible and usable capability for Ukraine, and the Abrams, which guzzles jet fuel and carries a heavy sustainment burden, as unsuitable.

At a Pentagon briefing Thursday, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the Leopard and Challenger aren’t comparable to the Abrams tanks.

The Leopard and Challenger are “a little bit easier to maintain,” Singh said. “They can maneuver across large portions of territory before they need to refuel. The maintenance and the high cost that it would take to maintain an Abrams — it just doesn’t make sense to provide that to the Ukrainians at this moment.”

A Kremlin spokesman said the deployment of Western tanks would trigger “unambiguously negative” consequences.

“All these tanks will require both maintenance and repairs, and so on, so [sending them] will add to Ukraine’s problems, but will not change anything with regard to the Russian side achieving its goals,” Dmitry Peskov said during a media briefing Friday.

As Friday’s meeting in Ramstein opened, Austin set an urgent tone, warning the conflict is at a “crucial moment” and aid to Ukraine should intensify.

“We need to dig even deeper. This is a decisive moment for Ukraine and a decisive decade for the world. Make no mistake, we will support Ukraine’s self-defense for as long as it takes,” he said.

With reporting by the Associated Press

The new U.S. military drawdown — worth about $2.85 billion and featuring 50 M2A2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles armed with anti-tank missiles — is aimed at getting as much to Ukrainian forces as possible during the winter months, before spring sets in and an expected increase in fighting begins.

Pentagon officials say the provision of several hundred armored vehicles, along with plans for U.S. training of Ukrainian troops on combined arms as well as operations and maintenance of the Bradleys, offer Ukraine a chance to retake territory from Russia’s invasion force. The vehicles are expected to help Ukraine’s infantry accompany its fast-moving armored forces.

“These capabilities will complement and work with the expanded U.S.-led training beginning this month that will build Ukraine’s capacity to conduct joint maneuver and combined operations,” Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, told reporters at the Pentagon. “We will ensure Ukraine has both the equipment and the skilled force necessary to sustain its efforts to push back on Russian aggression.”

The new aid, which draws from the Ukraine spending package Congress approved last month, includes $225 million for Ukraine and $682 million for European allies, under the U.S. Foreign Military Financing program, to buy American-made military gear over the long term. Cooper said Ukraine would likely buy air defense weapons, artillery and armored vehicles — its top priorities.

The latest military equipment drawn down from U.S. military stockpiles includes new types of projectiles, such as an undisclosed number of RIM-7 Seasparrow missiles, which Ukraine can integrate into its Soviet-era Buk air defenses, and 4,000 127mm Zuni rockets, which can be mounted on Ukraine’s fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft.

With the Bradleys come more M113 armored personnel carriers; mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles; and Humvees. The U.S. is sending 155mm Paladin self-propelled howitzers for the first time, with more 105mm towed howitzers and related ammunition.

The Bradley, a tracked vehicle made by BAE Systems, carries up to 10 troops and is usually armed with two TOW anti-tank missiles, a 25mm Bushmaster chain gun and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. With it the U.S. is sending 500 TOW missiles and 250,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition.

Germany and France also pledged to send infantry fighting vehicles from their arsenals, but the allies stopped short of sending Western tanks, which are more complex for Ukraine’s needs and have longer-range guns. The Bradley, used to transport troops to combat, is not a tank but is known as a “tank-killer” because of the anti-tank missile it can fire.

Cooper defended the pace in sending the armored vehicles and the United States’ reluctance to send Abrams tanks. The new package, she said, became appropriate as Ukrainian forces have “demonstrated a lot of growing proficiency in maintenance and sustainment” on American and other systems, partially through using remote “tele-maintenance.”

While the U.S. and the Netherlands are due to jointly send refurbished Czech T-72 tanks, “the Abrams tank in addition to being a gas guzzler is quite challenging to maintain,” she said. “What we are looking at in the Bradley is a capability that we could envision them really using to great effect, along with the training.”

Still, Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Thursday that this year his country will receive weapons from Western allies that it did not in 2022, and that “the time of the weapons taboo has passed,” thanks to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy’s “marathon” talks with foreign leaders this week.

U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz confirmed in a joint statement Thursday that the U.S. would provide Bradleys to Ukraine while Germany would provide Marder infantry fighting vehicles. France earlier this week pledged to send AMX-10 RC vehicles, billed as “light tanks” on wheels boasting armor-breaking 105mm guns.

The Marder contingent entails “up to 40 vehicles,” or a battalion’s worth, according to officials in Berlin. Deliveries of the vehicles to Ukraine, plus an eight-week training for Ukrainian troops in Germany, are to conclude by the end of March.

German Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht and her U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin, spoke by phone Friday about details of their new contributions and to prepare the Jan. 20 meeting of international donor countries known as the Ramstein format.

Lambrecht described the Marder and Bradley pledges as a “joint German-American initiative” to ship Western-made combat vehicles to war-torn Ukraine, supporting France’s contribution of what she described as wheeled reconnaissance tanks.

The Marders could be sourced both from the armed forces’ inventory and a pool of vehicles held in storage by manufacturer Rheinmetall, according to a statement by the German Defence Ministry.

The latest German military contribution also includes a Patriot air defense system, following the Americans’ lead from December. Previous notable military contributions by Berlin include rocket launchers, howitzers, the IRIS-T anti-missile weapon and the Gepard air defense tank, which is credited with shooting down Russian drones and missiles despite being deemed too old for service in the Bundeswehr.

Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said the planned combat vehicle deliveries had been closely coordinated ahead of the announcement this week, suggesting other international partners could follow suit in the coming weeks.