Guns and ammo would both be lethal aid, because they’re used to kill people.
Non lethal aid would be armor, medicine, food, unarmed vehicles, intelligence, surveillance equipment, and money.
Defensive weapons like point defense weapons like antiaircraft and missile defense systems are yet another category. In the case of missile defense they’re nonlethal, because no one is on a missile, but you could easily repurpose it to shoot down a bomber, which does have people on it. Still, a defensive weapon though.
Jammers and targeting pods are skating right up the line between lethal and nonlethal aid, because they’re not lethal by themselves, but they’re intended to be used with lethal weapons.
These are real and honest distinctions, and trying to pass it off as a mere propaganda term is a real disservice.
Lethal aid is pretty straightforward. Weapons, and ammunition. Perhaps not enough weapons to mount a counter invasion and force Moscow to become a mere tributary of the revived Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but enough to make Russia think twice about invading…
The tricky bit is “non lethal assistance”, which is often used to support insurgent groups. Technically if an country supplies a truck (on which a gun will later be mounted), or laptop (that will eventually be used to run targeting software for an artillery piece, that’s enough distance to qualify as “non-lethal assistance”…
See here, for a criticism of non-lethal assistance.
For me the objection is to diluting the language around killing people.
It helps soften, normalize all the murdering we do. Yes there are specific and meaningful distinctions between the types of weapons we hand out, but not their purpose.
Even if we’re killing people to prevent them from killing other people, we’re still killing people. This is America, that’s what we do - and then find gentle ways to not quite talk about it. We don’t give a fuck about saving people’s lives, we just don’t want Russia to win. That’s the disservice.
Nationality is about the way that people in the present think about the what is to come. If Ukrainians regard themselves as a national community with a future together in a state, then the issue is settled. Historically speaking, the idea that a dictator in another country decides who is a nation and who is not is known as imperialism.
although perhaps he is being unreasonably prejudiced against a man whose guiding philosophy seems to reflect a
nice German saying about this: “Und willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag’ ich Dir den Schädel ein”: if you won’t be my brother, I’ll beat your skull in.
Or “taxpayers” or “human resources”. The American right would rather we not think of ourselves as citizens and workers, which imply a certain amount of agency.
In quotes it means it’s being attributed to someone else. It makes clear that it’s not a standard term.
The phrase “lethal aid” is a euphemism. It’s a euphemism for “weapons.”
Superficial precision and correctness is often a feature of euphemism. To say detainees instead of prisoners specifies an important constitutional distinction. To say interrogation techniques specifies legal rationale and purpose. Likewise, lethal specifies weapons and aid specifies that they are not being sold. But in each case the supposedly more precise term is unusual and academic, which means it loses the unpleasant and alarming connotations of normal everday words (“captives”, “torture”, “missiles”) and the attention they draw. And in the case of “lethal aid” it is also intended to evoke the usual humanitarian and medical connotations of aid.
“Military aid” was also euphemistic. Euphemisms lose their eu as time goes by and familiarity grows, hence the need for variation and novelty.
Identifying and mocking euphemisms helps neutralize them and ultimately turn them into dysphemisms. A fine example might be those “enhanced interrogation techniques”, which now clearly evoke torture but also weasel-wording and indeed the weasels themselves.
The thing to ask is simple: why don’t they just say weapons?
We’re doing it again. It seems as if every time the U.S. shows some muscle in some corner of the world — this time in Ukraine ahead of an expected Russian invasion — the White House convinces journalists to borrow its preferred term for the big weapons that could be used. This year’s models are lethal aid and defensive security assistance, phrases that have popped up in headlinesallweek.
The article goes on to detail what this lethal assistance entails.
Rather than parrot the bureaucratic voice, let’s take a look at what we’re actually sending to Ukraine as Russia and the U.S. fall into the familiar rhythms of the Cold War. While the administration declined to list all the specific weapons sent over, the haul includes 300 shoulder-fired anti-tank Javelin missiles, anti-armor artillery, and tens of thousands of pounds of ammunition. And although the U.S. is not directly supplying Kyiv with anti-aircraft missiles, NATO members Latvia and Lithuania are sendingStinger and other surface-to-air missiles as well as thermal imagers for firing them in the dark. Along with $2.7 billion in military aid to Ukraine since 2014, the Pentagon has put 8,500 troops on “higher alert” in case of an invasion.
