The Department of Defense’s recent announcement about its plan to withdraw 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany was framed as a modernizing effort to enhance strategic flexibility and better position troops closer to the NATO eastern flank.
But the Heritage Foundation says sacrificing troop permanence is a net loss to deterrence efforts in Europe.
“This is fundamentally an effort to strengthen conventional deterrence in Europe,” Heritage Foundation national security expert Jim Carafano told the Washington Examiner. “My issue is I don’t think it’s the right answer.”
Carafano said the Pentagon’s move to comply with President Trump’s demand for a troop withdrawal from Germany prioritizes the use of rotational forces over conventional deterrence when both are needed.
“We do need more rotational forces, but we also need more forward present forces,” he said, referencing Heritage’s annual Index of U.S. Military Strength and a recurrent debate in defense circles.
“It’s substituting one for the other, which doesn’t really get you further down the track,” he said.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Wednesday that pulling approximately 11,900 troops out of Germany will be done “in a manner that will strengthen NATO, enhance the deterrence of Russia,” and fulfill his goal of a more agile, flexible force, capable of “dynamic force employments.”
The number of troops in Germany will be cut from 36,000 to 24,000 in “a matter of weeks,” Esper said.
Some 6,400 troops will return to the United States, while another 5,600 service members will be shuffled to other U.S. bases in Europe, including in Belgium and Italy.
Those troops returning to the U.S. would be part of future rotational deployments to places such as Poland, the Baltic states, and the Black Sea region of southeastern Europe, but no firm plans were announced.
The long-awaited public announcement made by Esper, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten, and Gen. Tod Wolters of U.S. European Command caps a turbulent month since Trump first announced that troops would be pulled from Germany as punishment for the ally not meeting its 2% of GDP defense contribution to NATO.
During the last month, NATO allies have expressed concern for the move, and members of Congress have voiced their dissent and tried to block it with language in the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act.
The premise of the move, underpayment, is also in question.
In recent months, battered by the coronavirus pandemic, Germany and many other allied nations’ economies have suffered, thereby reducing their GDPs and the corresponding 2% benchmarks. Regardless, Germany’s $54 billion defense spending still ranks third in NATO defense spending behind the U.S., which spends $740 billion, and the United Kingdom, which spends $60 billion.
Carafano said, up to this point, the Trump administration has “unquestionably” strengthened European deterrence.
This move will have a net loss in that effort, he said.
While Carafano welcomes rotational forces in the Black Sea region, the movement of troops to Italy actually improves response time to the Middle East, an area of the world Trump has repeatedly said he wants U.S. forces to pull back from.
Furthermore, the types of planned repositioning to Central and Eastern Europe is not the combat multipliers that are needed, Carafano explained.
“It’s not the right kind of stuff,” he said. “They need air defense. They need aviation. They need artillery. That’s not the kind of forces we’re moving around here.”
The economic argument is also false, he said, because “once you spend that money, you don’t get anything for that money. It’s just gone.”
Rotational forces are costly to position, return, and reposition, whereas infrastructure and pre-positioned reserve investments are long-lasting.
The Pentagon said Wednesday that the repositioning of troops and the relocation of the headquarters for U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command from their Stuttgart, Germany, location would cost billions.
While Wolters said those troops returning home will be “maintaining a key focus on Europe,” Carafano said troop presence in the area makes a difference.
“Forces that are present are something politically, militarily that an opponent has to deal with,” he said. “They just send a stronger deterrent signal.”
