Lots of people disapprove of sending military aid to Israel, and there are a million different reasons. Some support Hamas, believe it or not. Others are anti-Hamas and pro-Palestine; they want to avoid civilian deaths, and who can blame them? And then there are a few who just don’t want to spend the money — and, again, that makes sense.
For those who just want to slaughter Jews, I have nothing for you. You’re a waste of human flesh and I sincerely hope bad things happen to you for the rest of your hopefully brief life.
For everyone else, I have a story.
One criticism of sending munitions to Israel is that it depletes American stockpiles dangerously. This is accurate… sort-of. Artillery, for instance, we’re still sending them the oldest stuff from the 1970s that’s near its expiration date.
However, while we’ve got thousands of tons of artillery ammo, some munitions, like the new low-radius Hellfires, don’t sit around long. They cost $100k per, and the Israelis are firing half a dozen every night and would like to have ten times as many.
So the AGM-114R, the Hellfire Romeo (pictured), is designed specifically to cause fewer collateral casualties. It’s the munition of choice to kill anyone within ten meters of the point of impact and nobody else.
Part of Biden’s deal with Israel is, they’ll use these in order to cause fewer civilian casualties in Gaza, and stop generating all the bad press. In exchange, we’ll sell them at cost, and we’ll finance the purchase at zero interest.
Now, it turns out Hamas is going to lie about civilian casualties anyway (who knew!) so from a PR standpoint this deal is pretty useless. I mean, we’ve done press releases, but nobody seems to care. And yet, Israel keeps using them, and Biden keeps hard-selling them. It’s almost as though they want to keep collateral damage down for its own sake.
This is half a million dollars every night, and they’re running out. They figure $100 million worth should be enough for the whole war, and if they have more, they’ll use them more frequently.
So: should we pass that part of the aid package?
Yeah, I know: There’s a lot more than just this one weapon. I’ll write more later. Answer the question.
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