Washington cuts NATO fighter pledges by a third

A confidential US document, obtained by Germany's Die Welt, lists precise cuts to the military forces America promises to deploy to NATO in emergencies. The reductions don't pull troops from European bases. They dismantle the reinforcements Washington pledged to send if a crisis erupts — forces NATO planners could previously count on and now cannot.

What the Leaked List Contains

The cuts target the NATO Force Model, the framework adopted after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that specifies which forces each member state commits to deploy within fixed timeframes: some within 10 days, others within 30 days, a third tier within six months. Washington submitted revised commitments on May 31.

The scope is sweeping. Fighter aircraft pledges drop by roughly a third: F-16s from 99 to 63, F-15Es from 54 to 36. All KC-46 aerial refuelling tankers, which allow combat jets to reach distant targets without landing to refuel, disappear entirely. Long-range reconnaissance drones are removed from NATO planning. Armed MQ-9 Reapers, the alliance's workhorse surveillance-and-strike drones, are halved (Focus.de). At sea, one of two carrier strike groups is pulled. Cruise-missile submarines are removed. Maritime patrol aircraft drop from 26 to 15. One of two strategic bomber formations goes.

Europe Has the Planes, Not the Commitments

NATO officials have said no defence gaps are expected. That confidence rests on European forces that exist in national inventories but are not formally assigned to NATO's crisis tiers. Europe collectively fields more fighter jets than Russia. But owning aircraft and pledging them to alliance operations on a fixed deployment rotation are different things. Commitment means funded readiness cycles, trained crews rotating through deployments, and a political decision to hand over forces a government might prefer to keep under national control.

Meta-Defense, a French defence-analysis site, calculates that replacing the withdrawn US conventional strike capacity alone would require 350 to 400 European multirole aircraft formally committed to NATO planning (Meta-Defense). No European government has announced pledges at that scale. The cost of sustaining those rotations (maintenance, training, logistics) would fall disproportionately on the countries with the largest air forces: France, Germany, the UK, and Italy. Washington's reductions, by contrast, are confirmed, itemised, and scheduled. The European substitution is voluntary, unquantified, and hostage to 31 national parliaments.

Nuclear Reassurance Won't Close a Conventional Gap

With conventional pledges shrinking, Washington and Paris are each offering nuclear reassurance, but nuclear weapons solve a different problem. The US is negotiating expanded nuclear sharing (the NATO arrangement where American B61 nuclear bombs are stored on allied soil and delivered by allied aircraft) with Poland and the Baltic states (Rzeczpospolita, LRT). Lithuania has begun discussing a constitutional amendment to permit nuclear weapons on its territory. Poland has formally proposed hosting a permanent US base (Polsat News).

France runs a parallel track. Its "dissuasion avancée" — a programme where Paris extends its nuclear umbrella to partner nations while keeping sole launch authority — now includes nine partners after Norway joined in May (Euronews). Poland is pursuing both tracks simultaneously, though the American and French systems have incompatible command structures: Washington controls the B61s, Paris controls its own warheads, and no mechanism exists to coordinate the two.

Nuclear deterrence guards against existential threats. It does not replace the fighter squadrons, tankers, and patrol aircraft NATO needs for conventional operations below the nuclear threshold, the grey zone where most military crises actually play out.

Five Weeks to Ankara

NATO's summit in Ankara on July 7-8 is the political deadline. If European allies arrive without specific force commitments to fill the gaps documented in the leaked list, the capability hole becomes the new baseline. Washington's cuts are filed. Europe's response remains a stack of intentions, each one waiting for a parliament, a budget line, and a political decision that nobody has yet made.