The Bookkeeping

From February 2022 through December 2024, the United States appropriated $175bn for Ukraine and $26bn for Israel under emergency supplementals. The April 2024 supplemental gave Ukraine $61bn and Israel $26bn: 63 and 28 per cent of a $95bn package. As nominal arithmetic over the most recent three years, Ukraine costs more.

NPR ran the comparison through 2024; so did Planet Money, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Al Jazeera. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ran it under the headline "$175 Billion." None is doing accounting wrong inside its own frame.

The framing reaches past careful budget journalism. On Piers Morgan in April 2024, asked why the dollar case against Ukraine aid did not apply to Israel - more dollars, more decades, locked in by treaty - Patrick Bet-David said Israel was "slightly different" and moved on.

The framing is the artifact.

The window holds three years of Ukraine. Three-quarters of a century of Israel sit outside it.

Ukraine entered the US foreign-aid ledger as the 21st-largest recipient in fiscal 2021, drawing $597m. The Russian invasion of February 2022 ran the figure to its supplemental peak. CRS puts the total through April 2024 at $175bn; CFR's through December 2025 at $188bn. Both count from a baseline close to nothing.

Israel entered the same ledger in 1949 and has run continuously since 1951. The CRS cumulative inflation-adjusted total through 2022 is $317.9bn, the largest of any post-war recipient - and excludes the post-October 2023 supplementals, the Brown Costs of War figure of $9.65-$12.07bn for regional operations attributable to Israel defence, the August 2024 $20bn F-15IA package, and the war this chronicle is tracking.

Three successive ten-year Memoranda of Understanding set the floor. Clinton signed the first on 19 July 1999: $26.7bn and the end of the parallel economic-aid programme. Bush signed the second on 16 August 2007: $30bn at $3bn a year. Obama signed the third on 14 September 2016: $38bn through fiscal 2028, of which $33bn in Foreign Military Financing and $5bn in cooperative missile-defence. The signing fact sheet called it the "single largest pledge of military assistance in US history."

No other country has this. Egypt's Camp David commitment, the closest analogue, runs at $1.3bn a year: a third the dollar value, no missile-defence component, no Off-Shore Procurement exemption, no co-development tail. Jordan and Saudi Arabia receive aid in different forms; none get a ten-year multi-billion-dollar floor reset every decade.

The Obama MOU carried a no-supplements clause. Israel signed a side letter promising not to seek Congressional supplements without administration consent, with reimbursement for any FY2017-18 excess. The clause held only in the absence of regional conflict. The conflict-exception fired on 7 October 2023 and has run for two years; reimbursement has not been collected. Washington and Jerusalem are now negotiating a fourth ten-year floor.

Ukraine has none of this. No MOU, no fixed floor, no co-development tail. Each appropriation has been event-driven; the existing tranches are running down and there has been no new one since April 2024. The Lend-Lease authority lapsed in 2023 unused.

Every dollar appears somewhere. Fifty years of accretion have produced nine concurrent streams, no two booking the same way.

The MOU framing makes a recurring war commitment look like a fixed budget item. $3.8bn a year is presented in budget summaries the way office rent is presented in a corporate prospectus.

Off-Shore Procurement lets Israel spend 26.3 per cent of its FMF grant inside its own defence industry, in shekels, on Israeli-made articles - roughly $815m of US grant money each year, outside US industrial accounting. The Obama MOU mandated a phase-out by FY2028 but kept the exemption through FY2024. No other FMF recipient can recycle US grant funds through its own industrial base.

WRSA-I, the War Reserves Stockpile Allies-Israel, has held US-titled prepositioned ordnance on Israeli soil since the 1980s - precision-guided munitions, tank rounds, artillery shells, owned by the Treasury and drawn into IDF operations on a presidential signature. Stockpile value reached $4.4bn before October 2023. The April 2024 Israel Security Supplemental (P.L. 118-50) raised the Israel-specific drawdown ceiling from $100m to $2.5bn for FY2024 and waived the $200m Section 514 cap on transfers in. The munitions stay US-titled until used, then book as Defense Department inventory adjustments. Most operating policy is classified.

The Washington Post reported in March 2024 that the Biden administration had approved more than 100 separate arms sales to Israel since 7 October 2023 and notified Congress of two. Each fell below the $25m and $100m notification thresholds under the Arms Export Control Act. Thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker-busters, small arms - none appear as a line item.

Missile-defence co-development splits across several streams. The April 2024 supplemental booked $3.5bn as the FMF tranche to Israel and, separately, $5.2bn in missile-defence replenishment and $1.2bn for Iron Beam procurement. The co-development tail runs through DoD R&D and procurement, outside the foreign-aid budget. Cumulative US contribution to Iron Dome runs from $3bn (CRS through 2022) to over $6bn after October 2023; David's Sling over $3.8bn through 2024; Arrow co-developed since 1988 with Washington funding "just under half" of annual development through the same DoD lines. Four interceptor systems, no single line that sums them.

The August 2024 F-15IA package - 50 new aircraft, 25 modification kits, $18.82bn - runs as a Foreign Military Sale, not direct aid. Israel pays the bill with FMF: the United States gives Israel the dollars under the MOU, and Israel buys American-made weapons with them. Israel records the purchase, US industry records the sale, the Treasury records the original grant. The dollar does triple work and appears once on the foreign-aid topline. Deliveries run through 2035.

CENTCOM operations defending Israel book against Operations and Maintenance, not Israel-specific appropriations. The April 2024 Iranian missile-and-drone attack and the US shootdown ran on that line. So did the October 2024 attack and shootdown, the THAAD battery and roughly 100 personnel sent to Israel that month, Operation Prosperity Guardian against the Houthis, and the 52-day anti-Houthi campaign in spring 2025. Brown Costs of War (Bilmes, October 2025) puts the increment above the standing baseline - operations in Yemen and the wider region "sparked by or in support of Israeli military operations" since 7 October 2023 - at $9.65-$12.07bn.

The 2025-2026 US-Iran war runs on ongoing DoD operations and the anticipated 2026 stockpile reconstitution supplemental of "as much as $50bn" floated by the Pentagon comptroller in March. It will book in the defence budget, not the foreign-aid topline.

Totalling the US cost of the Israel relationship requires nine appropriation streams across five Congressional committees and three executive-branch reporting structures: the State Department foreign-aid line, the Pentagon missile-defence research budget, the Pentagon missile-defence procurement budget, DSCA arms-sales notifications, the prepositioned-stockpile drawdown authorities, CENTCOM Operations and Maintenance, the emergency supplementals, the sub-threshold transfers, and the standing classified portions. The Ukraine cost can be computed by reading two inspector-general reports.

2024 was Ukraine's nominal peak and one of Israel's heaviest years on record. The asymmetry shows up inside it. Ukraine's $67bn arrived almost entirely through one instrument: the April supplemental absorbed 90 per cent of the year's flow. Only 27 per cent of Israel's $34bn ran through the supplemental. The other 73 per cent moved through five concurrent structural channels: the MOU baseline, missile-defence co-development, sub-threshold transfers, the prepositioned stockpile, and CENTCOM operations defending Israel. The structural slices continue after the supplementals stop.

The Israel figure counts a CENTCOM share on the structural reading - a defensible portion of Gulf basing, the post-1979 Iran deterrent, and the residual Iraq-war footprint. The narrow marginal-cost reading shrinks that share to the post-October 2023 spike, putting Israel's annual flow at $26bn and the supplemental at 47 per cent. Both readings are sourced. The structural one is the durable claim because Gulf basing, the Iran deterrent, and the Iraq-war footprint run whether a war is on or not.

The window has closed. The US share of Ukraine aid passed below the European share in 2024 and has kept falling; the Kiel Institute's June 2025 figure had Europe committing €4.4bn more in defence procurement than Washington. Total Ukraine military aid for 2025 ran 13 per cent below the 2022-2024 average.

The PURL mechanism - Trump and Rutte's July 2025 agreement under which NATO allies buy US-made weapons for transfer to Ukraine - passed $4bn in pledges by December 2025. Weapons flow to Ukraine, US defence industry receives payment, the foreign-aid topline carries no Ukraine line. Ukraine has been removed from the legible part of US accounts.

Israel's flows have not changed. The MOU baseline runs through FY2028; April 2024 supplemental tranches are still being delivered; F-15IAs deliver through 2035. If the 2026 reconstitution supplemental enacts at the comptroller's $50bn floor, it will replace munitions fired in part to defend Israel against Iranian retaliation in the war the chronicle is tracking.

The 1999-2024 cumulative comparison turns on an attribution choice the mainstream coverage leaves implicit: how much of CENTCOM, the Gulf basing posture, and the Iraq war attaches to the Israel relationship. Under the tightest reading Ukraine costs ×1.7. Under defensible structural attribution Israel costs ×3-5. The range is the finding. The architecture was not built to produce a single answer. Methodology and sourcing.

The war this chronicle has tracked since February 2026 is the latest layer of the same structure. Three carrier strike groups in Central Command, the 82nd Airborne flown forward, the Tripoli ARG moored at Diego Garcia. Around 30 per cent of the Tomahawk stockpile expended in the first four weeks; half the Patriot PAC-3 inventory; half the THAAD - pulled from Pacific stocks. The replacement supplemental will book against the defence budget; the operations against CENTCOM O&M; the next MOU against the foreign-aid topline; the F-15IAs against arms-sale notifications.

R013 traced the present bill to the Pacific deterrent. The same accounting that has kept the five-decade total uncomputable has spent sixty-seven days distributing this war's costs across the same lines, and will distribute the next supplemental, the fourth MOU, and the war after the same way.

Inside the supplemental window Ukraine costs more. Outside it, the dollar total of the relationship is what cannot be assembled.