WSJ article (verbatim) describes US gov't arms transfers to Israel designed to avoid Congressional oversight and public scrutiny

And so we sent them a few thousand MREs (stale military meals that last for years) in addition to the munitions. Will the MREs make the State of the Union tonight?

https://www.wsj.com/world/how-the-u-s-arms-pipeline-to-israel-avoids-public-disclosure-e238de75

The U.S. has sent tens of thousands of weapons including bombs and precision guided munitions to Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks using procedures that have largely masked the scale of the administration’s military support for its closest Middle East ally, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The administration has organized more than 100 individual transfers of arms to Israel, but has only officially notified Congress of two shipments made under the major foreign weapons sales process, which are usually submitted to lawmakers for review and then publicly disclosed, U.S. officials said. In both cases, the administration used an emergency rule that avoids the review process.

The rest of the transfers have been approved using less public mechanisms available to the White House. Those include drawing from U.S. stockpiles, accelerating previously approved deliveries and sending weapons in smaller batches that fall below a dollar threshold that requires the administration to notify Congress, according to current and former U.S. officials.

An Israeli soldier near Israel’s border with Lebanon this year. Photo: ronen zvulun/Reuters

The handling of the weapons transfers underscores the crosscurrents buffeting the White House. It has grown increasingly frustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war but continues to fend off calls to use the arms pipeline as leverage to press him to reduce civilian casualties and increase humanitarian aid entering Gaza.

Some of the officials and several lawmakers said the limited disclosure points to a broader pattern in which the Biden administration has sought to avoid scrutiny from Congress. Some fellow Democrats want President Biden to use weapons shipments to pressure Netanyahu’s government.

The deep U.S. military partnership with Israel, which receives more than $3 billion in military aid every year from Washington, enabled an immediate surge in weapons shipments after Oct. 7. There are currently 600 active cases of potential military transfer or sales worth more than $23 billion between the U.S. and Israel, State Department officials said.

A missile is fired from a U.S. Army helicopter at the Yakima Training Center in Washington last year. Photo: U.S. Army

“We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement, adding that “claims that we have split cases so that they fall below established statutory thresholds or failed to appropriately engage partners in Congress are unequivocally false.”

State Department officials informed lawmakers in recent weeks about the full extent of the transfers to Israel, according to a person familiar with the briefings, but there has been no public disclosure of most of the shipments.

“While the State Department has no legal obligation to notify below-threshold arms transfers, using this process to repeatedly end-run Congress—as sales of this quantity suggest—would violate the spirit of the law and undermine Congress’s important oversight role” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told The Wall Street Journal.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The decision to provide the arms in about 100 tranches reflects the administration’s desire to keep the scope of its military support to Israel out of public view as much as possible, critics of the transfers said.

“This stuff is non-transparent by design,” said Josh Paul, a State Department official handling congressional relations who resigned in October in protest of the Biden administration’s policy on the Gaza war.

The U.S.-supplied arms since the beginning of the Gaza war include at least 23,000 precision guided weapons, including Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, drones, and Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, which turn unguided bombs into “smart” bombs, along with other similar weapons, U.S. officials said.

Israel has also received 58,000 155mm artillery shells and munitions for its Iron Dome air defense system, the officials said.

Artillery at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Scranton, Pa., last year. Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press

Most of the weapons and systems came out of U.S. stockpiles in the early days of the war. The flow has dropped off in recent months as the Pentagon has run short of munitions it can provide Israel quickly, while also meeting Ukraine’s needs and maintaining sufficient U.S. stockpiles, the officials said. The U.S. has provided 1,000 precision guided munitions and artillery shells in the past month, U.S. defense officials said.

The handling of weapons shipments to Israel stands in contrast to the administration’s approach to arming Ukraine in its war against Russia’s invasion, in which the Defense Department has regularly published lists of arms that it sends to Kyiv. While not all transfers to Ukraine are made public, the Pentagon provides updates on the total amount of military assistance.

For Israel, the American weapons transfers have allowed the military to sustain the war in Gaza while also staying ready for the possible outbreak of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Shiite militant group with an arsenal of missiles supplied by Iran. The group is considered a more capable adversary than Hamas. Israel and Hezbollah have engaged in a slow-burning cross-border conflict since the war in Gaza began.

The Israeli military has dipped into its own arms stockpiles it maintains on its northern border, but not to an extent that would undermine its ability to fight Hezbollah, said a senior Israeli military official. Israel is concerned that U.S. supplies could taper off if Biden were to apply more pressure to Israel, or threats from China and Russia were to take precedence over the effort to arm Israel, the official said.

“There’s nothing that Israel can say that it has not gotten. Israel got basically what it needed. When you look into the future, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to stay like that,” the Israeli military official said.

Lawmakers and congressional aides say that the administration has broken with decades of government practice by failing to provide, except in a few cases, what is known as an “informal notification” to key congressional leaders of arms deliveries to Israel in which legislators are given weeks to review a potential sale or transfer before the administration sends legally required formal notification.

“There is nothing in the law that prevents the administration from saying ‘this is an emergency and we have to do it. Our national security is at risk,” said Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Usually the executive branch errs on the side of caution.”

For the reader who demands I cover Ukraine (which I have) one can read this:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-spills-beans-about-deep-involvement-ukraine-part-ploy-undercut-republican-congressional-opposition-war/5851484