Trump says the United States got nothing from Ukraine. That claim works when you count weapons shipped out and leave out what comes back. @yigal_levin points to a precedent the Pentagon understood perfectly well half a century ago.
The 1973 Lesson
During the Yom Kippur War, Israeli forces stopped Syrian attacks with Soviet-built tanks on the Golan Heights, then went on the offensive. American planners were studying how NATO might survive a Soviet advance in Europe, including through the Fulda Gap. They feared conventional forces might fail to stop it without nuclear weapons.
So in early 1974, Pentagon specialists went to Israel and questioned officers who had fought those battles. What had they seen? Which decisions had worked under fire? Which assumptions had collapsed on contact with the battlefield? Washington wanted the details. An exercise could test a plan. The survivors of the fighting could tell it where the plan broke.
The Value Today
Ukraine and Russia are the two armies with sustained experience of a land war at this scale and intensity. That experience cannot be purchased from a contractor or recreated in a war game. Ukrainian forces have had to learn under fire how drones change movement, how artillery and electronic warfare interact, and how quickly tactics must adapt when the enemy adapts too.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine share their experience with the Pentagon. That gives American planners access to lessons from a contemporary fight against the very military NATO has spent decades preparing to deter. Each lesson has limits. A battlefield in Ukraine is no perfect model for every future war. Serious militaries study those limits rather than throw the evidence away.
Trump can put a dollar figure on a Patriot battery or a HIMARS launcher. He cannot produce a credible invoice for years of combat experience, so he declares the return to America zero.
Trump can put a dollar figure on a Patriot battery or a HIMARS launcher. He cannot produce a credible invoice for years of combat experience, so he declares the return to America zero. The Pentagon's own conduct after 1973 shows how absurd that accounting is. The US sought out Israeli officers because their knowledge mattered to American security. Ukrainian soldiers are providing Washington with knowledge earned at an even greater human cost. Calling that “nothing” is an insult to them and a lousy way to think about US defense.