A top Pentagon envoy walked into NATO headquarters in Brussels last week and told allied officials what many had feared: the United States is pulling all of its submarines from NATO commitments, cutting its fighter jet contributions by a third, and halving its strategic bomber pledges. The briefing, reported by SPIEGEL, was the most concrete articulation yet of Washington’s intent to hand Europeans the burden of their own conventional defense.
Alexander Velez-Green, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, presented the figures to NATO political directors late last week. The numbers ran across every major conventional category. Beyond submarines and fighters, the US also intends to contribute fewer destroyers, sharply reduce its armed drone pledges, and expects European allies to supply their own reconnaissance drones entirely.
What stays untouched is nuclear deterrence. Washington’s position, as it is taking shape, is that the US will hold the nuclear line in Europe while Europeans largely handle the conventional one — a redefinition of the alliance’s basic division of labor.
The scale of what that means is visible in the existing structure. Under the NATO Force Model agreed in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US provided roughly half the alliance’s total military capabilities. The planned cuts carve deeply into that share.
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Velez-Green urged allies to close the capability gaps that would open up as quickly as possible. The US expects formal offers at the Force Sourcing Conference in early June, where member states will be asked to detail which assets they can provide and on what timeline. Washington intends to present the full burden-sharing overhaul at the NATO summit in Ankara in July.
The urgency of that timetable is not incidental. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Advisor, met NATO counterparts in Sweden last week and pointed to US commitments in the Indo-Pacific, the Western Hemisphere, and the Middle East. The subtext was hard to miss: US intelligence agencies estimate China will be capable of striking Taiwan by 2027, and Washington is increasingly focused on that clock.
The gaps left by a drawdown would fall unevenly. Germany, whose armed forces total 185,000 soldiers with roughly 30,000 troops, 200 fighter jets, and a number of warships held on 30-day standby for NATO, is scheduled to receive its first F-35s from the US next year. Poland has already taken delivery of its first three. Whether either country can absorb the conventional shortfall in the near term is precisely the question June’s conference is meant to answer — as is whether the broader European commitment made at last June’s Hague summit, where members agreed under US pressure to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, translates into actual capability in time.
A spokeswoman for Secretary General Mark Rutte acknowledged the structural problem plainly. Force planning had been “overly dependent” on Washington, she said.
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