Meet the tiny State Department offices clearing billions of dollars’ worth of weapons for Ukraine – By Sam Skove (Defense One) / Aug 24, 2023
They’ve handled a 150-fold increase in work by doing in hours what used to take months.
As Ukraine battled to push Russia out of the suburbs of Kyiv in March of last year, State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Mira Resnick got an urgent call from a U.S. military airfield in Germany.
An allied cargo plane full of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles had just landed, and the U.S. needed permission from the State’s Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs to ship the weapons on to Ukraine.
“They needed the legal authorization, and we needed to get it done fast,” said Resnick, whose office typically measured its work in weeks and months, not hours. “It was at that moment that I knew that our priorities would be shifting.”
Resnick’s bureau has since approved military aid to Kyiv worth tens of billions of dollars, all with less than 10 staff members focused on the issue.
