On the one hand the US and its NATO allies came face to face with the reality that endless promises of "unlimited" military aid to Ukraine to defeat Russia would not achieve that goal. Five weeks of the much-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive have produced zero results. They have only snuffed out another estimated 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers, this time mostly drawn from the shrinking pool of forced – and barely trained – conscripts.

Promises are one thing, but as they say, "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." Or, adapted for our times, the US may be able to print money, but it cannot print weapons.

Thus when President Biden was asked right after agreeing to send Ukraine a tranche of ghastly cluster bombs why he did so, he replied, "we've run out of ammunition." It was an incredible admission, particularly considering the massive increase in already astronomical US military spending.

As astute military analyst William Schryver aptly observed, with Biden's admission…

…the great myth of overwhelming US armaments supremacy has been exposed as little more than a modestly scaled boutique enterprise utterly ill-suited and ill-prepared to prosecute industrial warfare against a peer adversary.