I am currently touring the Baltic republics, where residents live in constant terror that Vladimir Putin will do to them what he has already done to Ukraine and Georgia. To prevent that from happening, the U.S. has deployed a company of soldiers in each of the Baltic states — Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Offshore, in the Baltic Sea, Russian aircraft are buzzing U.S. Navy vessels. So it is pretty strange that the U.S. Department of Defense, while protecting the U.S. and its allies from Russian aggression, is also subsidizing it.

How? By buying RD-180 rocket engines from a Russian company, which are then used to power the Atlas V rockets employed to launch military spy satellites. The American reliance on Russian rocket engines began in 1996 for commercial launches and then expanded to military payloads. As Eli Lake reminded us, the U.S. was supposed to transition over to exclusively American-made rockets by 2000, but that deadline keeps getting pushed back farther and farther because the Pentagon keeps claiming that it is too expensive to manufacture domestically.

This might have made some sort of sense in the days of the Russian “reset” but, by now, following the invasion of Ukraine, even the Obama administration doesn’t have many illusions left about the nature of the Putin regime. Yet the U.S. goes right on subsidizing Russia’s space industry which, by the way, is led by two officials who were sanctioned by the U.S. for their role in the invasion of Ukraine.

Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been fighting to end this subsidy for the Russian military-industrial complex, and he has found support from former senior intelligence and defense officials. A group of former policymakers — including former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former NATO commander James Stavridis, and former CIA and NSA Director Mike Hayden — have released a letter which states: “We have an American industrial base with multiple providers that can produce All-American-made rocket engines. There is no need to rely on Putin’s Russia for this sensitive, critical technology.” Indeed, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been fighting to get a share of the rocket-launch business from the Pentagon.

Yet the effort to phase-out the Russian rocket engines is being staunchly resisted by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which have teamed up with the United Launch Alliance to build the Atlas V rockets that depend on Russian engines. Their position is supported by Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, who just happen to represent the states where the Atlas Vs are assembled (Alabama) and where Boeing has its headquarters (Illinois). The Pentagon has also weighed in by claiming that getting rid of the Russian engines too soon will require moving money from other critical program areas.

The crux of the debate now is over whether to allow only nine more rocket launches with Russian-made engines, as McCain proposes, or as many as 18, as was proposed in a House bill. The impasse, it seems, could be broken readily enough if Congress were to appropriate the extra funds needed to make the switch expeditiously without forcing the Department of Defense to cut other planned expenditures.

Sure, it will cost a little more to go domestic, but it will be worth it to end America’s ludicrous reliance, as Eli Lake notes, “on Russian engines to launch the satellites that keep tabs on Russian aggression.”