Europe to backfill as US trims NATO force pledges

The United States has pledged fewer guaranteed forces to NATO’s force model and asked European allies and Canada to take up the slack, in a shift a senior NATO official has insisted can be managed without leaving a significant gap in the alliance’s defences, the official has said.

Speaking at a background briefing, the official explained that the NATO force model is the set of forces that the alliance’s Supreme Allied Commander knows he can count on, of assured availability and held at appropriate readiness to respond to missions, activities, operations and contingencies including the alliance’s defence plans, and said the United States had, in line with what it had been signalling for some time, told allies that it would commit fewer guaranteed forces while expecting Europeans to take “a more prominent role in Europe’s conventional defense”, a decision the official tied to the risk of simultaneous conflicts breaking out around the world.

Washington had invited European allies and Canada to step up and replace what it was withdrawing, the official said, a process already under way, with the Supreme Allied Commander now discussing the detail with allies to ensure the change was, in the official’s words, not undermining the credibility of the alliance’s plans, activities and missions.

The reason this need not open a dangerous hole, the official said, was that a great deal of European capability had never been declared to the force model in the first place, with nations holding aircraft such as F-35s back for national tasks or at lower levels of readiness, something the alliance had established through what it called the fifth step of its defence planning process, in which experts assess what allies actually hold in their inventories in real life.

Filling an American slot could therefore be, in the official’s striking phrase, a matter of “a phone call” from one capital offering a capability in place of what the United States had been providing, whether “like for like” with the same system or with something different that delivered the same effect, and while the official cautioned that “not everything can be absolutely replaced”, the small number of capabilities only the United States could provide did not, in this account, make a huge difference set against everything that could be substituted, provided allies actually took the decisions.

The official offered an explanation for why so much had been held back in the first place, noting that while some countries were “completely all in” because their entire defence policy amounted to their NATO contribution, others kept forces for commitments abroad or for national contingencies, a pattern the official suggested applied to France, to the United Kingdom and to Canada, while arguing that such forces, even if reserved for national tasks, would very likely be made available immediately to the Supreme Allied Commander in a collective defence scenario, since to withhold a division while Russia was invading would be meaningless and contrary to the spirit of the alliance.

There was also more flexibility within the force model than was sometimes assumed, the official said, with different levels of commitment meaning that pledging forces did not require pilots to be “in the seat 24/7”, and the official argued that it was better to have genuine assurance that forces would be available on the day a crisis broke than to sustain “a fiction about the assurance of US forces being available when we know they’re not”, with the executability of the plans and the level of risk involved ultimately a military judgement for the Supreme Allied Commander.

Pressed on the capabilities the United States alone brings, the official acknowledged that areas such as command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, deep precision strike and air-to-air refuelling were precisely where Europe needed to improve, describing them as “critical for military superiority”, and said European allies and Canada had to get “a lot more faster” at building them, not because of the American decision but because they had already agreed to do so and were constrained by their own production capacity and the need for greater industrial cooperation.

The official was at pains to separate the force model from the wider capability targets, explaining that allies were being asked to provide the forces needed to fight the plans in a protracted war against a fully reconstituted Russia, the maximum level of effort, of which the force model was only a subset, namely the forces of assured availability at the proper readiness to respond in the first days and weeks of a crisis, and concluded that even with the American reductions there would be no gap in the force model beyond a very few capabilities, as long as allies signed up.

They also made clear that the targets themselves are about to be reworked, explaining that while allies had agreed their capability targets last year and the alliance now had a clear idea of how each planned to meet them, NATO was embarking on a fresh cycle of defence planning in which the plans, and the force requirements that flow from them, would be revised, with intensive political discussions expected in the autumn of 2026 to set the parameters for that cycle and a new set of capability targets to be generated for allies, including the United Kingdom, in the spring that follows.