“Is this equipment available?” Oksana Markarova wondered aloud, during an interview with a Ukrainian daily.

Markarova serves as Volodymyr Zelensky’s ambassador to the United States. “This equipment” was a reference to some $1 billion in direct military assistance to Kyiv freed up Tuesday after the US Senate cleared a crucial foreign aid bill.

The legislation spent months languishing in America’s fractious lower chamber, where House Speaker Mike Johnson, an ultraconservative in his own right and an erstwhile Ukraine aid holdout, put his gavel on the line to push the measure late last week, along with aid provisions for Israel and Taiwan.

The Ukraine bill passed to the deep chagrin of the same hard-right confederacy which drove Johnson’s predecessor out of Congress. That contingent of lawmakers, which includes some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill, arguably did more to advance Russia’s military objectives in Ukraine over the last six months than Vladimir Putin’s allies in Beijing and Pyongyang.

That’s not an accusation. It’s just to say that by starving Zelensky of ammunition, on whatever rationale, the House’s far-right flank pushed the Ukrainian resistance to what observer after observer described as a breaking point. Now, it’s a race against time to get shells, anti-tank missiles and other desperately needed munitions to the front lines.

But Markarova’s remarks to European Pravda underscored another challenge for the US, a challenge which can’t be met simply by overriding recalcitrant holdouts in Congress: The “small” matter of locating enough actual arms. The Ukraine aid package clocks in at more than $60 billion, but the majority of that’s earmarked for rebuilding depleted American weapons stockpiles and making new weapons to send to Eastern Europe.

The fight in Congress over the foreign aid package was a preview of bigger legislative battles to come. Rearmament is an existential imperative. It’s not optional. And the cost will be astronomical. Most readers likely saw the new SIPRI report: Global military expenditures were a record $2.443 trillion in 2023, up nearly 7% YoY, the sharpest increase since 2009.

That increase was mostly attributable to the war in Ukraine, but the report also cited “escalating geopolitical tensions in Asia and Oceania and the Middle East.”

The figure above shows current dollar military outlays in 2023. Just seven countries spent more than Ukraine, all of them major powers with the exception of the Saudis.

Obviously, the US’s spending advantage is insurmountable. Outlays approached $1 trillion last year. China was a distant second at $296 billion. Russia found $109 billion in the couch cushions. That was nearly 6% of GDP, up from 3.6% before the war and the highest since the fall of the Soviet Union. Spending across Europe rose 16% last year amid Putin’s westward expansion plans.

This is surely going to escalate. The Western powers will be called upon again and again going forward to supply alliance partners, client states, dependents and anybody with a loose claim on a besieged democracy. SIPRI noted that world military spending per person was $306 last year, the highest in nearly a quarter century, which is to say the highest since the dissolution of the USSR.

The answer to Markarova’s question, posed here at the outset, is “yes.” But also “no.” Yes, Ukraine will receive a package of arms, beginning as soon as this week, which looks something like what the Pentagon promised to deliver upon passage of the foreign aid legislation.

But in a broader sense, “no.” No, the “equipment” isn’t “available” in the sense that if things were to abruptly spiral out of control, Western stockpiles are insufficient. And as we’ve seen over the past several months, the political will’s lacking in Western capitals, where consensus is difficult to come by. By contrast, consensus isn’t needed in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran. And all of that’s to say nothing of the logistical challenges inherent in delivering aid to the front lines expeditiously.

In the same interview, Markarova elaborated via a series of additional questions. “Will we find, and produce enough equipment quickly enough to get it?” she asked. “How quickly do we find it, check it, and restore it to a condition in which the American military can deliver it?”

For now, those questions are Ukraine’s problem more than they are anyone else’s. But… well, let’s just say that if a Franz Ferdinand moment came along tomorrow, the West would be caught woefully flat-footed, an unfortunate state of affairs considering the proverbial writing on the wall could scarcely be any larger.