Defence officials meet to discuss ramping up weapons production for Ukraine
Defence officials from more than 40 countries supplying weapons to Ukraine will meet Wednesday to talk about how many more long-range missile systems and air defences will be necessary to turn the tide of the war, and how long it could take to manufacture them.
Meetings this week of what the Pentagon calls “national armament directors”, held at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, are expected to focus on ramping up weapons production, not only for Ukraine, but also to meet longer-term demands for militaries around the world that want Nato-compatible munitions.
The talks are led by the United States, which has sent more than US$15 billion (S$22 billion) of military aid to defend Ukraine, and include allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
“We need to keep working together as Nato allies and with industry to replenish our munitions stocks and provide Ukraine with the support it needs, for as long as Ukraine needs it,” Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance’s secretary-general, told the armament directors at an initial gathering on Tuesday.
They are meeting as Russian President Vladimir Putin mobilises hundreds of thousands of troops to push ahead with a war that began in February and shows no signs of abating.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked the United States to equip him with long-range missiles that can fly 190 miles (about 305km) and reach into Russian territory. But the White House has been reluctant to send such weapons to Ukraine because doing so might provoke Putin into escalating the conflict.
Final decisions about what weapons Ukraine might next receive are unlikely to be made at the meetings, said a senior US official.
The official did not specify which weapons might next be deployed to Ukraine’s arsenal, or whether they would include the long-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a request from Kyiv that the Biden administration has resisted.
The official also cited the need for swift manufacturing of replacement gun barrels for 155mm howitzers, steel casings for artillery shells and ball bearings as priorities for arming Ukraine. He described the discussions in Brussels as an effort among allies to pool resources to produce more of those items quickly.
More broadly, defence officials will look for ways to bind allies by building and sharing weapons systems that can be used by multiple nations against threats for years to come. That would require defence contractors to accelerate production, in part by reducing supply chain bottlenecks, the defence official said.
The meetings are being held under the auspices of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group; a collection of about 50 nations created by the US Defence Department in the months after the Russian invasion. The group brings the top civilian and uniformed military leaders of member nations together for monthly meetings to discuss arming Ukraine.
It has hit a critical juncture: Nato countries must now increase domestic arms production in addition to sending weapons from their stockpiles.