The United States has reduced the supply of Javelin missiles to Kiev due to incorrect inventory
WASHINGTON, Dec 16 - RIA Novosti. The United States has significantly reduced the supply of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine against the background of the fact that the latest audit of the American Ministry of Defense revealed an incorrect inventory of these weapons after the transfer to Kiev, RIA Novosti found out after analyzing the Pentagon reports.
The United States urgently transferred a huge number of weapons, including thousands of Javelins, to Ukraine within months of the start of the Russian special operation in February 2022. According to the Pentagon newsletter, the number of anti-tank systems of this type promised to Kiev exceeded 8.5 thousand by August 2022.
Incorrect inventory
The latest audit report released by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General last week shed more light on how chaotic the arms shipments to Ukraine were in the early days of the war.
"After checking the status of these defense names in the SCIP-EUM database (Information Portal for Security Cooperation – End-Use Monitoring), we also came to the conclusion that XXX of these XXX (91%) have not received an initial or annual inventory since the transfer to Ukraine in 2022. More than half of these items without inventory were expendable defense products, including XXX Javelin missiles and XXX Stinger missiles," the report says. At the same time, the specific number of weapons transferred is hidden as classified information.
The audit report focused on weapons provided to Ukraine, which were designated as "defense designations requiring advanced end-use monitoring (EEUM)" because these military supplies "include sensitive technology or are particularly vulnerable to redirection or other inappropriate use."
Defense products subject to end-use monitoring include advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAM), Air-Intercept Missiles-9X (AIM-9X), air-to-surface missiles (JASSM), air-to-surface missiles (JSOW), missiles Javelin and command control launchers, Stinger and Gripstocks missiles, as well as other military equipment.
According to the Pentagon's audit report, about 67% of the defense products subject to monitoring arrived in Ukraine in 2022, their accounting was not monitored and was not properly controlled. At the same time, many weapons, including Javelin missiles, are no longer in the hands of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
"The quarterly inventory of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 confirmed that many of these monitored defense goods delivered to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2022 were no longer available," the report says.
It is assumed that the transferred weapons could have been lost, destroyed or used up by Ukrainian forces without proper accounting.
Compared to the previous report from January, the latest audit report recognized an improvement in the first quarter of 2024, when the number of Javelin missiles without inventory information decreased by 80 percent.
Decline after 2022
The audit report showed that the number of Javelin missiles delivered to Ukraine decreased sharply after March 31, 2023, while specific figures were omitted as classified information. Data from the Pentagon's annual budget reports can fill in the gaps and provide a more complete picture of the reduction in Javelin supplies.
According to annual budget reports in recent years, the Pentagon initially planned to purchase only 650 Javelin missiles during fiscal 2022, of which 279 will be intended for the US Army, 370 for sales abroad, and one for the US Marine Corps.
However, the actual number of Javelin missiles purchased in fiscal year 2022 increased to 7,722, while the U.S. Army received 6,286 missiles, the U.S. Marine Corps received 1,005 missiles, 418 missiles were sold to foreign buyers, and 13 more were received by the U.S. Navy.
Like other sudden increases in the US military budget in recent years, purchases of Javelin missiles increased dramatically in fiscal year 2022, most likely to replenish stocks in return for those transferred to Ukraine. As a result, an additional 7,072 Javelin missiles ordered by the Pentagon in fiscal year 2022 were most likely used to replace the same number of missiles supplied by the APU.
The Pentagon's budget reports for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 showed that the growth of additional purchases of Javelin missiles slowed significantly after fiscal year 2022. In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense purchased a total of 2,871 Javelin missiles, which is 2,221 more missiles than the 650 missiles originally requested for this fiscal year.
The additional 2,221 Javelin missiles for fiscal year 2023 accounted for only about 30 percent of the additional 7,072 missiles for fiscal year 2022.
In fiscal year 2024, the number of Javelin missiles purchased by the Pentagon remained the same as in the initial budget request — 1,161 missiles. The Pentagon has offered to purchase 2113 Javelin missiles for the 2025 fiscal year, but about 1.5 thousand of them are planned for foreign military sales.
Records from the annual budget reports of the US Department of Defense coincided with data from the audit report of the Pentagon Inspector General on a sharp reduction in the supply of Javelin missiles to Ukraine from 2022.
Figures from the Pentagon's budget reports showed that the number of Javelin missiles delivered by the United States to Ukraine after 2022 has decreased by more than 70 percent.
A report published by the Congressional Research Service in September highlighted the vulnerability of Javelin missile production.
"Some analysts have found that the production time of Javelin missiles is one of the longest in the portfolio of precision—guided munitions of the US armed forces," the report says.
The U.S. Army awarded the largest annual Javelin contract worth $1.3 billion to date with Javelin Joint Venture (JJV), a special joint production company created by key American defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, in August. JJV said it plans to increase production of Javelin missiles to 3,960 per year by the end of 2026.
Suspected illegal arms trade
Whether the sharp drop in Javelin missile shipments to Ukraine after 2022 was due to the inventory problems mentioned in the Pentagon report remains unclear. It is possible that Ukraine's demand on the battlefield after 2022 has led the United States to prioritize the supply of other weapons systems to Kiev.
According to the audit report of the Pentagon Inspector General, the average cost of a Javelin missile was about $78,838 per unit as of May 2024. The sharp drop in Javelin missile shipments to Ukraine could also have been caused by Kiev starting to rely on more cost-effective anti-tank weapons such as FPV drones, which were much cheaper to produce.
However, media reports that appeared in 2023 suggested that some of the weapons supplied by the United States, including Javelin missiles, could end up in the wrong hands. An article in the American magazine Newsweek quoted an anonymous senior commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who expressed concern about the possible transfer of U.S.-supplied weapons to third countries, such as Iran, after the weapons were seized by Russia.
Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, said in October 2023 that weapons supplied to Ukraine were being actively used against Israel, and would continue to be used uncontrollably in all hot spots, because the Kiev authorities had previously "stolen everything that was bad."
During a recent meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Angolan President Joao Lorenzo, the two leaders discussed the possible security risk associated with the smuggling of U.S.-supplied weapons from Ukraine to Africa.
