- Live War in Ukraine
The Pentagon plans to speed up the delivery of Abrams tanks to Ukraine, according to a U.S. official and a source familiar with the situation, and provide the vital equipment to Kiev this fall. The Biden administration has pledged to supply Ukraine with 31 M1 Abrams advanced tanks after months of rejecting the idea of deploying these hard-to-maintain tanks in the country. The new plan speeds up delivery by about a year, according to a congressional aide familiar with the matter.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on this reportbecause the Defense Department had not previously offered any specific date for leaving the tanks in Ukrainian hands, saying only that it would take "months."
"We're working on it," White House spokesman John Kirby told CNN on Tuesday. "There are some changes that can be made in the process to speed it up."
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has studied several options to speed up delivery and has reached a determination that would cut the delivery time by about a year, a congressional aide told Reuters.
Options Austin could have evaluated include shifting positions in the delivery queue or using U.S. tanks that have had sensitive equipment removed so they can't be captured and studied by Russian troops.
General Dynamics Corp's production line is currently completing about 12 Abrams tanks a month. The funding to disrupt the Abrams tanks would come from a fund known as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allows President Joe Biden's administration to source weapons from industry instead of drawing on U.S. weapons stockpiles. A round of USAI funding is being prepared for later this month, said sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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- Ukraine
- Joe Biden
- United States