My understanding of the situation is a tug of war between the Pentagon and the President. Supposedly, Patriot missile battery inventory is only at 25% of levels required by planned conflict forecasts. Follow up questions are: “What planned conflicts?” and “What does current production throughput look like?”

> curious why Trump is suddenly open to aiding Ukraine

Putin is an idiot. He had a perfect hand to play, and only had to engage in flattery. But his ego (and possibly domestic position) wouldn’t allow it, so he stonewalled Trump thereby forcing a situation where a war America could have been made to ignore is going to threw though another few hundred thousand Russian youth and another significant factor of its force-projection and industrial capacity.