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Americans paying for NATO’s ammunition stocks: US journalist

Saturday, 18 April 2015 9:33 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 18 April 2015 9:41 PM ]

Aircraft marshals stand by US F-15C Eagle fighter jets, assigned to the 159th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, at the Leeuwarden Air Base, northern Netherlands, on April 3, 2015, during a deployment for Operation Atlantic Resolve. (AFP photo)

An American political analyst says the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is heavily dependent on US money, is picking the American taxpayers’ pockets to pile up its weapons and ammunition.

Jim W. Dean, the managing editor and columnist at Veterans Today, made the remarks in an interview on Saturday while commenting on a report which says American military spending in Europe has risen in the past year in a NATO’s bid to boost allies against Russia.

Dean said when the Western military alliance runs out of military equipment the US just gives it what it needs, at the expense of the US taxpayers’ money.

“The announcement of the increasing of bunker munitions for NATO derives from an older story and that’s when given the Libyan war, NATO actually ran out of munitions specifically like some of the cruise missiles, because they just fired everything off on the no-fly mission which used up all of NATO’s ammunition,” he said.

“So of course the US stockpiles when [NATO] ran out had to be used to continue everything. Of course, the US taxpayer had to pay for that and the NATO countries did not,” he added.

According to Dean, at one point some years ago, when Europe was in the midst of a financial crisis, the Pentagon tried to get NATO, which includes mostly European countries, to not only restock the ammunition depots, but also to restock them at a higher level.

The move simply failed, said Dean, because of NATO’s budget concerns it simply didn’t want to restock its own munitions stockpiles and instead just took what it needed from the Pentagon.

“If Europe is not going to keep those bunker inventories high there doing it themselves, then again the American people will miss that [because] it’s far away and never realize that their pockets are being picked,” he noted.

Dean concluded that this is part of “this charade” by NATO and the US that Russia is some kind of a military threat to further waste the American taxpayers’ money by stocking up on ammunition for a possible war with Moscow.

HDS/GJH

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