The President Ran on Ending the War.
His Pentagon Just Deepened the Training Pipeline
for Ukraine — in Oklahoma.
The Washington Post this week recirculated the line that has defined three years of U.S. policy on Ukraine and that the Trump administration has now quietly inherited: U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war is deepening, with troops to train in Oklahoma. The installation is Fort Sill — the U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence, home of the 30th Air Defense Artillery Brigade and the only schoolhouse in the country that produces qualified Patriot operators.
The original cohort of roughly 90–100 Ukrainian soldiers arrived at Fort Sill in January 2023, completed an accelerated ∼10-week Patriot course, and rotated home to operate the first U.S. battery delivered to Kyiv. That pipeline never closed. Three years later, under a Republican president who ran explicitly on stopping the war, it is being refreshed and expanded. Sec. of War Pete Hegseth (R) told the Senate on May 12, 2026 that he had “personally approved additional personnel” deployed alongside Ukrainian forces. Sec. of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll (R)told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 13 that the U.S. Army is now studying Ukrainian battlefield software directly — the predicate for the deepening training relationship.
The political tension is the story. The same administration that has run a three-day-ceasefire diplomatic track with Moscow and threatened to cut off weapons is, on the ground at Fort Sill and at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson and at Joint Base San Antonio, continuing to do exactly what its predecessor did. “Stop the war” is the campaign slogan. “Train the Ukrainians” is the operations order. Both are now true at the same time.
- ~90–100Ukrainian soldiers per cohortOriginal Fort Sill Patriot operator class (Jan 2023). Pipeline has been continuously refreshed across successive rotations — per Pentagon, Stars and Stripes.
- ~10 weeksaccelerated Patriot operator courseCompressed from the standard ~1-year U.S. Army Patriot operator pipeline at the Fires Center of Excellence, Fort Sill — per CNN, DoD News.
- MIM-104 PatriotPAC-2 GEM-T / PAC-3 MSEThe weapon system. Ukraine has nearly exhausted its PAC-3 interceptor stock as of March 2026; the Iran war drained U.S. inventory in parallel — per Al Jazeera, Reuters.
- ~$130.7BU.S. security assistance to Ukraine since 202271% of all U.S. Ukraine allocations as of December 31, 2025; Congressional Research Service / Council on Foreign Relations running tally.
- ~50%of U.S. Patriot interceptor stockpile expendedU.S. forces are estimated to have used roughly half of their Patriot interceptors during the Iran conflict; CSIS analysis cited by TIME, Fortune, Fox News — the supply-side reality behind every training class.
The installation: Fort Sill is a 145-square-mile Army post southwest of Oklahoma City, built around the U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence (FCoE). It houses the Air Defense Artillery School, the Field Artillery School, and the 30th Air Defense Artillery Brigade. It is the only place in the United States where the Army produces qualified MIM-104 Patriot operators.
The course: A ∼10-week accelerated Patriot operator and maintainer pipeline, compressed from the ∼1-year U.S. Army standard. Ukrainian crews train on the launcher, the AN/MPQ-65 radar, the Engagement Control Station, and PAC-2/PAC-3 fire-control. Per the original 2023 Pentagon briefing, the cohort drew “90 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers” from front-line air-defense brigades.
The parallel pipelines: Fort Sill is the air-defense leg of a multi-installation U.S. training enterprise. Ukrainian F-16 pilots train at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson with the 162nd Wing; F-16 maintainers at Joint Base San Antonio for English-language and technical schools; combined-arms cohorts at Grafenwöhr, Germany under the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine and SAG-U.
What ‘deepening’ means in May 2026: Successive Patriot cohorts continue to rotate through Fort Sill. The Trump Pentagon has not closed the schoolhouse line. It has, per Hegseth’s May 12 testimony, expanded the U.S.-personnel footprint inside Ukraine to learn from the drone fight and inform the next iteration of CONUS-side curriculum.
“The Ukrainians have fundamentally altered how humans engage in conflict. We are learning a lot from them, and we are changing to a lot of the lessons that they have taught us.”
Sec. of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll (R) · Senate Armed Services Committee, May 13, 2026
The contradiction is on the record. President Trump campaigned in 2024 on ending the Russo-Ukraine war “in 24 hours” and on cutting off the open-ended American check. As president, he has pursued a parallel diplomatic track — including a three-day Russia-Ukraine ceasefire that he announced for May 9–11, 2026 — and threatened at multiple points to walk away. He has not walked away. The arms continue to flow. The training continues to run. The Patriot operators continue to graduate from Lawton.
1. Hegseth’s May 12 testimony: The Sec. of War told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he “personally approved additional personnel there [in Ukraine] to learn from that drone battlefield, both on offense and defense.” That is U.S. service members embedded forward, with Sec. of War sign-off, in May 2026.
2. Driscoll’s May 13 testimony: The Sec. of the Army — the Trump appointee, age 38, the youngest Army Secretary in history — told the same committee that Ukraine’s Delta command-and-control system has surpassed U.S. capability, and that the Army has launched “Operation Jailbreak” at Fort Carson, Colorado, to close the gap. The U.S. is now the student in the relationship.
3. The munitions reality: In parallel, U.S. forces are estimated to have expended roughly half of the Patriot interceptor stockpile during the Iran conflict, per CSIS. Ukraine has nearly exhausted its PAC-3 interceptors. The Pentagon’s FY27 budget request seeks roughly $70 billion for munitions — nearly triple the current line — to rebuild. Training a new Ukrainian Patriot crew while you cannot supply them with missiles is a policy choice, not an oversight.
The frame: The Trump administration has not ended the U.S. role in the war. It has restructured it — faster diplomacy with Moscow, sharper public language about European burden-sharing, and a continued military training-and-arms pipeline that looks, from Fort Sill, almost identical to the one it inherited.
Secretary of War: Pete Hegseth (R)— the Trump-era rebrand of the Defense Secretary title; sets the policy line, signed off in May 2026 on additional U.S. personnel forward-deployed in Ukraine.
Secretary of the Army: Daniel P. Driscoll (R)— 26th Sec. of the Army, age 38, North Carolina lawyer and Iraq War veteran. The Trump administration’s lead Army-side interlocutor on Ukraine; led the November 20, 2025 Kyiv delegation that presented the 28-point peace plan to President Zelensky. Owns the Fort Sill training enterprise.
Security Assistance Group–Ukraine (SAG-U): Headquartered at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne, Wiesbaden, Germany. Established November 2022. Commanded by Lt. Gen. Curtis A. Buzzard, dual-hatted as commander of the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU). SAG-U coordinates the entire allied training enterprise, of which Fort Sill is one node. As of mid-2025, SAG-U/NSATU had trained ∼192,000 Ukrainian personnel across allied countries.
U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence (FCoE), Fort Sill: Owns the schoolhouse, the instructor cadre, and the equipment used in the ∼10-week Patriot operator course. The 30th Air Defense Artillery Brigade is the operational unit that absorbs and graduates each cohort.
The internal split: The Hegseth/Driscoll relationship has been publicly contentious — the Washington Post documented the clash in April 2026 (“After clashes with Hegseth, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll says he’s going nowhere”). The training pipeline has continued through the friction. Driscoll, by all available reporting, is the operational owner; Hegseth is the political owner.
Fort Sill sits inside Oklahoma’s 4th Congressional District, currently represented by Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK-04), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The state’s two senators are Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and James Lankford (R-OK). None of the three has publicly opposed the Patriot training program at Fort Sill. Cole has, on the contrary, defended it on the floor of the House Appropriations subcommittee.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK-04, Fort Sill district): In FY24 DoD appropriations testimony, Cole described visiting Fort Sill where he found Ukrainian troops disassembling and reassembling Patriot system vehicle components. “Because of the expertise at Fort Sill, it made sense for us to bring the Ukrainians back to Fort Sill to execute” the training. As Appropriations chair, Cole controls the very money that funds the schoolhouse line.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK): Trump-aligned, served as a Trump-administration emissary to Capitol Hill on multiple foreign-policy questions. Has publicly supported continued military pressure on Russia while echoing the administration’s line on European burden-sharing. Has not moved to strip Fort Sill funding for Ukrainian training.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK): Senate Intelligence and Finance committees. Hawkish on Russia; has consistently voted in favor of supplemental Ukraine packages while pushing for accountability and oversight on the spending. Has not opposed the Fort Sill training mission.
The political read: Oklahoma’s all-Republican delegation backs the Fort Sill mission. Lawton (population ~92,000) is an Army town; the Patriot schoolhouse is the local economy as much as it is a national-security asset. Opposing a training mission that pumps DoD dollars into Comanche County is not, locally, a politically attractive position.
“Because of the expertise at Fort Sill, it made sense for us to bring the Ukrainians back to Fort Sill to execute.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK-04), Chair, House Appropriations · DoD Approps testimony
The Fort Sill mission for Ukraine is unusual in its political moment but ordinary in its design. The Pentagon has run allied air-defense and aircraft training inside the United States, on U.S. installations, with U.S. instructors, for seventy years. Reading the Patriot pipeline as a one-off Trump-era escalation misses the institutional baseline.
German Bundeswehr at Fort Bliss, TX (1956–2022): The German Air Force ran its Patriot/Hawk/Nike operator school at Fort Bliss for 66 years, dissolved only on June 30, 2022. German soldiers trained on U.S. soil for two-thirds of the Cold War.
Saudi F-15 pilots at Morris ANGB, Tucson: The Royal Saudi Air Force has trained F-15 aircrew alongside U.S. Air National Guard units in Arizona for decades.
Taiwanese F-16 pilots at Luke AFB, AZ: The Republic of China Air Force has run a permanent F-16 training detachment at Luke since 1997.
Ukrainian F-16 pilots at Morris ANGB, Tucson (since 2024): Four Ukrainian pilots are currently in the 162nd Wing’s F-16 program; ~20 maintainers in English-language training at Joint Base San Antonio. The Fort Sill Patriot line is the air-defense companion piece.
The point: CONUS allied training is not a Cold War curiosity or a Biden-era invention. It is the standard Pentagon model for arming an ally with U.S. equipment and qualifying the operators to use it. Ukraine is, in that respect, in the same category as West Germany, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Israel. What is new is the political theater around it.
Total U.S. obligations: Approximately $188 billion in Congressional spending tied to the Russo-Ukraine war as of December 31, 2025. Roughly $130.7 billion of that is the security-assistance category — weapons, training, intelligence, and SAG-U/NSATU operations. The training enterprise (Fort Sill, Morris ANGB, Joint Base San Antonio, Grafenwöhr) is a small line by dollar-share; it is the policy spine.
FY27 Pentagon ask:~$70 billion for munitions — nearly triple the current line — reflecting Patriot, Tomahawk, and air-defense interceptor stockpile depletion across the Ukraine, Israel, and Iran fights.
What the schoolhouse costs: The Pentagon has not published a discrete Fort Sill-Ukraine line item; the cost is absorbed into the FCoE training budget and supplemental Ukraine appropriations. Per GAO-24-107776, the training enterprise as a whole — CONUS plus Europe — runs in the low single-digit billions per year, dwarfed by munitions and equipment transfers.
The arithmetic that matters: A trained Patriot crew with no missiles is a placeholder. The May 2026 reality is that the U.S. is producing crews faster than it can produce interceptors, while drawing down its own stockpile in the Iran fight. Training continuity without munitions continuity is a brittle line of policy.
The Trump administration ran on stopping the war. Three years and roughly $130 billion in security assistance later, its Pentagon is still running Ukrainian Patriot crews through Fort Sill, still pushing F-16 pilots through Tucson, and — per Sec. of War Hegseth’s own May 12 testimony — just expanded U.S. personnel forward in Ukraine. “Stop the war” is the slogan. “Train the Ukrainians” is the operations order. Both are true at the same time. The voters who marked the first box are entitled to ask how the second one stayed in the field.
Pleased to welcome Hon. Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army @SecArmy, on his first visit to Ukraine. This visit provides an important opportunity for the senior military officials accompanying the Secretary to assess the situation on the ground and to witness firsthand…
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 12 May 2026. Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language. #StandWithUkraine
President Trump — May 8, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT — announces the three-day Russia-Ukraine ceasefire (May 9-11) on Truth Social: “Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought War.” The ceasefire is the diplomatic track running parallel to the Fort Sill training pipeline.
President Trump — May 11, 2026, 10:27 PM EDT — reposts a defense of U.S. munitions stocks discussing Tomahawks, ATACMS, SM-FAD, SM-3, and Patriot interceptors, with the Pentagon line that the U.S. has “moved interceptors from Europe, from Ukraine, into this fight.” The supply-side reality behind every Patriot crew Fort Sill graduates.