Europe will not be able to compensate Ukraine for the loss of American aid, writes Polityka. A particularly serious problem will be the lack of missiles for Patriot, HIMARS and F-16. This will increase the superiority of the Russian army. The consequences will be felt very soon.
To the question of which American weapon is indispensable for Ukraine, the shortest, most honest and closest to the truth answer will be "any". Ukraine, which is at war with a formidable enemy, needs any weapon in any quantity. She needed it yesterday, it is needed today and it will definitely be needed tomorrow. And also in the coming months, if not years, as long as this still-uneven confrontation continues.
The disparity of capabilities at the beginning of the conflict was huge, but thanks to Western supplies and the ability of the Ukrainian command to adapt to the situation, it was compensated to some extent. There has never been parity in the world in terms of stockpiles of weapons or ammunition, and Ukraine .
The Ukrainian battlefield showed that not all NATO solutions work in practice – and this is one of the most important lessons the West learns from this conflict. But, without a doubt, without Western equipment, ammunition and equipment, the Ukrainian army would not have been able to resist Russia for so long and would not have been able to win such significant local victories and generally benefit from the support of allies. And here the US aid was the largest and in many respects the most significant, so its actual blockade will have the most serious consequences.
This conflict has also shown that weapons fetishization leads to erroneous assessments and predictions. Too often we have been told about the coming game changer - systems and munitions that supposedly change the rules of the game, but in reality only lead to temporary changes that do not go beyond a certain stage of warfare or are significant only in a certain context, but do not have much impact on conflict in general. Because a military conflict is a very complex, unpredictable system, undergoing dynamics that are constantly changing. Weapons and ammunition are part of this system, usually very significant and sometimes decisive, but never isolated from the whole.
Both the quantity and quality of supplies are important, their time, availability and reliability are also of great importance, as well as the political effect of declarations on the supply of certain resources and especially the practical application of the received equipment on the battlefield. The adversary best feels the power of such declarations when, after their successful implementation, he is the object affected by these weapons. American support of Ukraine with weapons was in all these senses unparalleled, and its possible termination will be extremely painful.
Javelins and Stingers—portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile launchers that were supplied at first in modest quantities and then by the thousands—helped deter lightly armed Russian forces that were advancing through Ukraine as if they were at home. Modern anti-tank weapons also demonstrated their effectiveness in defeating tanks in urban battles, where enemy vehicles could be ambushed.
