(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The Biden administration has spent the past year giving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weaponry to the Ukrainians while ignoring domestic crises including a recession and an invasion at the southern border.
However, President Joe Biden’s warmongering may be far more than a waste of U.S. resources—it may also be helping to empower other longtime U.S. enemies who could create geopolitical instability in the years to come.
Russia has begun sending captured U.S. weapons to Iran—the biggest benefactor of President Joe Biden‘s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal—where the weapons will presumably be reverse-engineered and repurposed for Iranian ends, CNN Politics reported.
According to the report, Russia has captured numerous, high-end weapons systems and sent them to Iran.
Putin has “flown the equipment to Iran to dismantle and analyze, likely so the Iranian military can attempt to make their own version of the weapons,” CNN said, citing unnamed sources.
“Russia believes that continuing to provide captured Western weapons to Iran will incentivize Tehran to maintain its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine,” it added.
Such disasters have already happened on multiple occasions in the past several decades.
In the 1970s, Iran created the Toophan anti-tank guided missile, which was reverse-engineered from the American BGM-71 TOW missile.
Iranians also captured a U.S. manufactured drone in 2011, reverse-engineering it to create a new drone, which they have used to spy on Israel.
According to Jonathan Lord, a senior fellow and director of the Middle East security program at the Center for a New American Security, these past successes on Iran’s part indicate that they have the capacity to do the same thing with the newer technology.
“Iran has demonstrated the capability to reverse-engineer US weapons in the past,” he noted.
“They reverse-engineered the TOW anti-tank guided missile, creating a near-perfect replica they called the Toophan, and have since proliferated it to the Houthis and Hezbollah,” he continued. “Iran could do the same with a Stinger, which could threaten both civil and military aviation throughout the region.”
Lord also suggested that the weapons could be effectively used to threaten Israeli sovereignty in the Middle East.
“A reverse-engineered Javelin could be used by Hamas or Hezbollah to threaten an Israeli Merkava tank,” he said. “In the hands of Iran’s proxies, these weapons pose a real threat to Israel’s conventional military forces.”
The shipping of weapons to Ukraine has also been problematic for America, however, as the U.S. military faces a massive weapons shortage with few prospects of manufacturing capacity increases in the horizon.
