The building is literally being rebuilt in the shape of a middle finger.

Ukraine support is draining resources from US troops stationed in Europe and damaging their combat readiness, according to a new Pentagon inspector general report. In its report to Congress in November, the watchdog said the US Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF) was forced to divert resources from US forces and longstanding operations toward supporting Kiev because of the lack of dedicated Ukraine funding in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. “These resource gaps have negatively impacted USAREUR-AF’s overall readiness, training effectiveness, and capacity to exercise operations plans,” the report states. In particular, Ukraine-related operations were consuming funds intended for routine deployments and essential spare parts for US military equipment. On top of that, some rotating US units returned to their home bases with unpaid spare-parts bills, according to the report. An earlier report for January-March said the command redirected a total of $364.6 million from other requirements to support Ukraine.

The funding squeeze stemmed from failure to approve major emergency aid packages for Ukraine in 2025 and 2026 in Congress, where many Republican leaders vehemently opposed the “blank-check” policy for Ukraine. Since returning to office, US President Donald Trump has also opposed further large-scale US-funded aid packages for Ukraine, seeking instead to shift the financial burden onto Kiev’s European backers. The US has committed more than $198 billion in Ukraine aid since 2022, much of it under former President Joe Biden. Of that total, around $65 billion remained available for payment as of late September. However, $60.71 billion of this is already legally committed to contracts and other obligations, leaving the Trump administration limited room to redirect or halt the spending. The Pentagon has also struggled to replenish weapons and ammunition taken from US military stockpiles to supply Ukraine. The watchdog cited a $38.6 billion backlog of unfunded requirements to replenish US military stockpiles depleted by Ukraine aid. In addition, last year’s Pentagon audit found that the department failed to maintain controls over the use of funds aimed to replenish aid sent to Kiev, noting that funding reallocations, worth $5.7 billion, lacked adequate documentation. Auditors also identified $920 million in missed opportunities to use replenishment funds and found that the military overstated spending commitments and payments to Congress.

Since coming into office, Trump has resisted unconditional aid to Ukraine, opting instead to sell weapons to the country as part of the NATO-coordinated PURL mechanism where most procurements are financed by Ukraine’s European backers. While Trump’s policy does not erase Biden-era commitments, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers accused his administration this week of delaying the execution of a separate $400 million Ukraine aid package until the final weeks of the fiscal year. Last month, Washington approved the sale of 500 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine, funded by Kiev and its backers, but given the backlog and the Iran war, which depleted US stockpiles, the deliveries could take years. Moscow has warned against Western military assistance to Kiev, arguing that it only prolongs the conflict without changing the outcome.

Huddled beside an airstrip in southern Germany, a handful of anti-Communist warriors prepared to fire the first shots of the Cold War. A CIA officer from the Munich Operations Base was in charge. The Hungarian crewmen he had recruited stood nearby in flight suits. With them were two Ukrainian exiles who had volunteered to parachute into their homeland. They were code-named Apostle 1 and Apostle 2. Each carried forged identity papers, a miniature radio transmitter, a pistol, a machine gun, hand grenades, a purse full of gold coins, and a poison pill to be taken in case of capture. An unmarked C-47 transport plane was waiting. The CIA officer overseeing this operation, a twenty-six-year-old Yale graduate named Stephen Tanner, watched the plane take off and disappear into the night. It flew over East Germany and Poland, then crossed into Soviet airspace. As it approached the Ukrainian city of Lviv, a cargo bay swung open. The two Ukrainians jumped into the darkness. Their mission was to link up with partisan fighters, seize territory, and establish a clandestine base through which the CIA could send them weapons. That flight, on September 5, 1949, was the first American act of covert war in Ukraine.

The two would-be commandos who jumped that night were an advance guard for what became Project Aerodynamic, the most ambitious and furthest-reaching project the CIA ever launched inside the Soviet Union. Its aim was to foment subversion in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Behind it lay a simple calculation: The Soviet Union is America’s mortal enemy; its greatest internal threat comes from Ukraine; the CIA should do everything possible to intensify that threat. From their base in Munich, Tanner and other CIA officers anxiously awaited messages from the two Apostles. None came. An after-action report concluded tersely that “the Soviets quickly eliminated the agents.” It added, though, that this mission “sparked considerable interest at headquarters.” Losing two agents was hardly enough to derail such a promising project. On May 19, 1950, another C-47 took off from the same base in Germany. This time it carried four Ukrainian volunteers. They parachuted into western Ukraine with a cargo their CIA overseers had packed. It was enough to arm a potent guerrilla band, including fifty submachine guns, thirty rifles, twenty-five pistols, and a hundred phosphorus grenades. The four volunteers hit the ground. They radioed news of their safe landing with cargo. Then they disappeared. Later that summer, two more Ukrainian volunteers bade their comrades an emotional farewell. According to a CIA cable, “a round of drinks was served, toasts were made…hands were shaken, tears were shed.” Their plane departed at 6:55 p.m. on August 12. The pilot missed their drop zone in Ukraine, and they jumped twenty miles away. Neither was ever heard from again.

well, I guess feeding Ukrainians into a Russian/Soviet meat-grinder is an old American tradition…

These flights were the centerpiece of a far-reaching operation in which the CIA sought to foment armed uprisings in Soviet-controlled territory. Between 1949 and 1952, the CIA dropped about eighty-five men, all equipped for guerrilla warfare, behind what was then called the Iron Curtain. Three-quarters were quickly captured or shot. “You’ve got to have a few martyrs,” reasoned Allen Dulles, chief of covert operations for the CIA. “Some people have to get killed.” Project Aerodynamic was a match made in covert-action heaven. Thousands of Ukrainian partisans had refused to lay down their arms after their Nazi allies surrendered on May 8, 1945. They wanted to keep fighting the Red Army— if they could find a new sponsor. At that same moment, the CIA was looking for a force that it could use to strike against the Soviet Union from within its own territory. Aerodynamic was the progeny of this union. It set off three-quarters of a century of American intervention in Ukraine.

Fear and uncertainty marked the first encounter between Americans and anti- Soviet Ukrainians. In the autumn of 1947, two years before the first CIA airdrop into Ukraine, officers from the Army Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied Germany learned that a band of armed Russians had appeared in the countryside near Munich. At first they thought this might be an advance guard preparing the ground for a Red Army invasion. A patrol was sent to investigate. Soldiers scoured the hills and meadows around the Bavarian village of Waldkirchen. Early on the morning of September 10, they heard voices. They closed in on a campfire around which men wearing military uniforms were singing in what sounded like Russian. After a moment of tension, the soldiers willingly surrendered their machine guns and hand grenades. These thirty-five men, along with four other members of their band who were picked up nearby, were brought to an American base and debriefed for three weeks. It turned out that they were not Red Army soldiers, but Ukrainians who had consecrated their lives to fighting the Red Army. They belonged to a partisan force that was unknown to most outsiders: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Their commanders had ordered them to walk westward, find Americans, and seek help for the partisan rebellion. One of the partisans told an interrogator that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was “engaged in armed combat with Soviet troops in the Ukraine at present” and that more Ukrainians were “ready to revolt” if given support. An officer who helped supervise the interrogations cabled to Washington that the Ukrainians were offering services “which may be of interest to you and may tie into an idea which, I believe, is being worked on at home at the present time.” “If, as I understand, there is some planning going on with regard to how such groups as referred to above might be best used in our interests,” he suggested, “it might be useful to follow up this matter.”

Americans had just begun fighting the Cold War. Their great handicap was that they knew almost nothing about what was happening inside the Soviet Union. Now they learned that Ukrainians were waging war against the Red Army. This was an intelligence bonanza that opened new landscapes of possibility. Some of the CIA’s most impassioned Ukrainian agents had fought alongside the Nazis just a few years earlier. Among them were veterans of SS Einsatzgruppen — mobile death squads assigned to massacre Jews and other civilians. This history troubled some of their American handlers, but not enough to disrupt their partnership.

Across Europe, American intelligence officers scoured teeming displaced persons camps looking for Ukrainians who were willing to join a covert anti-Soviet war. Recruitment was easy. Hundreds of thousands of young men — not just Ukrainians but refugees from all over the continent — were huddled in the bleak purgatory of these camps. The best they might hope for was work clearing rubble or picking crops. When men introducing themselves as part of the “American Intelligence Service” offered them paying jobs with good living conditions, plus the prospect of returning to war against Bolshevism, many jumped to accept. Vetting was minimal, so recruits included more than a few who had worked with the Nazis as militia members, police officers, and executioners. One recruiting officer said his job was easy: “You’d go to a refugee camp and say, ‘Here, Joe, you want to join a special project?’ Most of these people were, like, the homeless.” This recruitment laid the foundation for Project Aerodynamic. Over the following years, it would overlap with other CIA projects using various cryptonyms, among them Acrobat, Androgen, Antler, Cartel, Carthage, Crust, Outbound, PDDynamic (PD was code for the Soviet Union), Plumb, and Red Sox. The goal — using Ukraine as a platform for covert war against Moscow — never changed.

The Space Force’s multibillion-dollar effort to build a satellite network that rapidly moves data over high-speed laser links will require an entirely new set of satellites and significant extra funding to connect with other military space systems, Breaking Defense has learned. In effect, this new group of satellites will serve as translators between different sets of optical waveforms — two or three missile warning/tracking constellations in the short term, and others in the future — in order to ensure multiple systems can talk to each other. That connectivity is a vital part of supporting Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative that the network is supposed to help speed into existence, multiple sources said. The Space Force plans to orbit an “operational prototype” of the Space Data Network Backbone being built by SpaceX by 2027. The large constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) will serve as the data backhaul layer — essentially, the central communications traffic router — of the service’s planned SDN architecture, a space-based network of networks designed to connect sensors to shooters. The Space Force envisions the SDN as a hybrid constellation comprising military and commercial communications satellites that eventually will be able to share data across missions, including missile warning, tracking and targeting as well as both air- and ground-moving target indication. As a top priority, the SDN will focus on connecting to the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) Tracking Layer satellites for detecting and tracking missiles to be stationed in LEO and Space System Command’s (SSC) similar Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking- Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) birds.

SpaceX won a $2.29 billion contract in May to fast-track development of the SDN Backbone to meet President Donald Trump’s 2028 deadline for implementing Golden Dome. The Space Force has not publicly disclosed how many satellites the backbone will include, but the effort is a restructured version of the earlier MILNET constellation, which a Space Force official said last year would comprise more than 480 satellites. The SDN Backbone’s central feature is the use of lasers for satellite-to-satellite communications. Laser links, which function via optical communications terminals (OCT) on board satellites, allow the transmission of bigger volumes of data faster and more securely than the radio frequency links carried by traditional communications satellites. However, SpaceX is using proprietary OCTs on the SDN Backbone satellites, dubbed by the company as “Plasers,” that cannot directly exchange data with those equipping both the SDA and SSC missile warning/tracking satellites, according to multiple industry, former government and current Space Force sources. To complicate matters, these sources said, the OCTs used by SDA and SSC also are incompatible.

To address this lack of connectivity, the Space Force is considering a constellation of 12 to 13 additional satellites that could allow otherwise incompatible OCT payloads to exchange data, two industry sources and one former Space Force official said. The proposed satellites, known as Space Exchange Points (SEPs) or “translator satellites,” are expected to cost somewhere $12-14 million each, these sources said. That means the satellite project itself would cost north of $100 million, but the sources said that the overall cost of the wider overhaul could reach up to $1 billion — quite the price tag especially at a time the Pentagon is expected to get less funding than it asked for from Congress. Even aside from the extra costs, however, several sources expressed frustration with the situation with regard to the Space Force’s two new missile warning/tracking constellations, saying it could have been avoided had the Pentagon focused on standardization at an earlier date. Instead, the service is now having to scramble to fix a problem that, the sources emphasized, never needed to happen. An SSC spokesperson declined to comment on the compatibility of its MEO birds with SDA’s LEO satellites or SpaceX’s Plaser and also declined to comment on the SEP program’s end goals and projected costs. SpaceX did not respond to a detailed inquiry from Breaking Defense.

Different Standards Block Connectivity

The crux of the connectivity problem is that the SpaceX, SDA and SSC OCTs are based on different technical standards governing the precise optical waveforms used, and thus how many gigabits of data per second the laser links can transmit, sources explained. Part of the reason for the standards mismatch is the decision made some time in 2025 by the Department of the Air Force to flip from using SDA’s Transport Layer of data relay satellites as the SDN backbone to instead relying on SpaceX’s constellation — at the time dubbed MILNET and already in use by the National Reconnaissance Office. By that time, SDA already had been developing both the Transport Layer and the Tracking Layer satellites based on its own open-source OCT standard, a first version of which was published in 2022. “The optical waveform/terminals on SDA’s Transport Layer and Tracking Layer satellites, which carry the SDA OCT Standard, are not directly compatible with the Plaser waveform,” an SDA official confirmed. The disconnect between SDA and SSC on OCTs is harder to justify, one former Pentagon official said, given that both developmental programs began at roughly the same time in 2019 — and thus could have worked together to develop compatible OCTs. However, one industry source said, a possible argument for the differences is that SDA has been focused on developing OCTs optimized for its LEO-based satellites, whereas SSC is concentrating on operations in MEO where satellites are farther from the Earth and farther from each other than in LEO.

The Space Force is not unaware of the challenge it faces. G.P. Sandhoo, head of both SDA and the Space Force’s new Missile Warning and Tracking Portfolio Acquisition Executive office, on Oct. 28 told a panel at Silicon Valley Space Week conference in Mountain View, Calif., that his shop will eventually need to figure out how to integrate data from sensors carried by satellites in different orbits, according to an article in Space News. The SDA official added that “interoperability” between the OCTs for the LEO and MEO missile warning/tracking constellations is currently “being evaluated” by the Space Force. One solution is simply for the SEP satellites to carry both SDA and SSC standard OCTs, along with software to transmit their data to the SpaceX Plaser and the SDN Backbone satellites. Another potential solution is for both the LEO and MEO constellations to use a new version of SDA’s optical waveform standard, called v.4.0.0, that potentially could resolve the problem in the future, according to current and former Space Force officials. That standard was developed in consultation with SSC, the former Space Force official said, and has “two modes:” the first essentially is the same standard SDA is using for “LEO to LEO and LEO to ground” communications; the second would allow LEO to MEO optical data transmission. Thus, it could be used to directly link LEO and MEO missile warning/tracking satellites, and avoid having to add a third OCT payload onto the SEPs. The SDA official said the version 4 standard “is not yet on contract to be fielded in any SDA Tranches, but is in consideration for Tranche 4.”

Translator Sats To The Rescue?

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The concept of a translator satellite is not a new idea. SDA in 2022 was working on the idea to allow data from commercial satellites eventually to flow into the Transport Layer. But questions remain about how difficult it will be to implement. “Reasonable people will disagree on how difficult it is,” one former Space Force official said. “[T]he technical challenges from the hardware side are pretty straightforward. … But there is some networking translation that has to happen in addition to just the hardware configuration.” In addition, the official said, the SEP satellites as currently designed are not compatible with either SDA’s Tracking Layer satellites or the Transport Layer, which is being transferred to SSC for further development as a separate so-called enclave of the SDN specifically focused on connecting to legacy military platforms such as fighter jets. Which raises the question of whether yet more development and funds will be needed.

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As for the Transport Layer, the shift of the program to SSC has thrown the program’s scope, schedule and funding up in the air. The Pentagon’s 2027 budget request shows funding continuing for the Transport Layer’s first two tranches, but no funding for SDA’s earlier planned Tranche 3 and beyond.