…

So, the obvious issue with leasing military hardware is that it’s likely to be destroyed, if the other side can manage it, and I’m not sure who deals with that.

The nomenclature of leased air defense equipment and the scheme and renting conditions were also not disclosed.

Yeah.

and the United States is leasing 500,000 rounds of ammunition from South Korea.

I’m pretty sure that rather than the US sitting on that ammunition and then handing it back, the US is going to hand US artillery rounds to Ukraine, and Ukraine is going to use those rounds of ammunition. Like, South Korea isn’t getting them back. We – the US – may have promised to manufacture and provide new rounds for South Korea when we have the capacity to both supply Ukraine and have extra capacity to send some to South Korea, but I don’t know if I’d call that a lease.

I’ve seen people describe stuff like this as a “ring trade”, but that’s done for political reasons – like, one guess I saw from a think tank was that China might refrain from supplying artillery to Russia to use against Ukraine but might be willing to participate in a scheme where North Korea transfers N artillery rounds from their inventory to Russia, and China provides North Korea with N Chinese artillery rounds, thus creating political separation for China.

My understanding is that South Korea has said that it will not provide weapons to Ukraine. However, while it might be perfectly functionally-equivalent for South Korea to send artillery shells to the US and the US to send an equal number of shells to Ukraine, that might be considered to be politically acceptable to the South Korean public.

We pulled a similar political dodge back in World War II.

After World War I, in the interwar period, a bunch of European countries mass-defaulted on loans that the US had issued at the Lausanne Conference. This was very unpopular with the American public – this was still an era when defaulting on a loan was considered to be something of an immoral action – and in conjunction with upset over having been involved in World War I, led to the interwar passing of the Neutrality Acts, which were initially aimed at not letting the US provide weapons to countries in Europe. Roosevelt managed to get them weakened to permit the US to provide weapons as long as it wasn’t on credit.

Later, this became Lend-Lease. The idea was to make sending weapons – which the American Executive Branch wanted to do – more palatable to the public, if it wasn’t seen as simply a transfer. In practice, virtually nothing provided under Lend-Lease was paid for: the terms were such that anything destroyed in the war didn’t need to be paid for, anything a country was willing to return after the war didn’t need to be paid for, and anything a country wanted to keep for post-war use would be offered at one-tenth of cost and with financing. The Soviet Union didn’t even bother with that, made a few payments and then stopped. That is, the program really existed to sell the program to portions of the American public who were unhappy about the cost, rather than because leasing made much economic sense or was really the goal.

So even where “lease” shows up, I suspect that it’d be likely to be something of a misnomer.