Pentagon pulls submarines from NATO

The American retrenchment from Europe is no longer a mood in Washington. It now has numbers attached. The United States has told NATO allies it will provide no submarines to the alliance, cut its fighter jet commitment by one-third, and halve the pool of strategic bombers available in a crisis. Alexander Velez-Green, the Pentagon envoy, laid out the figures in a closed briefing at NATO headquarters last week (Defense News, El País). Washington wants European plans to cover the gaps by early June.

The Loophole Congress Cannot Touch

The mechanism matters. These cuts run through the NATO Force Model, the classified system under which member states pre-assign military assets to three levels of crisis readiness. The US is not pulling troops out of Europe. It is removing the formal promise that reinforcements would arrive if a war came (Stars and Stripes).

That distinction gives the Pentagon room to move. Congress can block withdrawal from the NATO treaty, and it can set legal minimums for US troop numbers in Europe. But the force pledges inside the NATO Force Model sit inside classified executive discretion, with no statute governing them (Military Times). NATO’s crisis-response architecture can therefore be hollowed out without a vote on Capitol Hill.

Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy driving the shift, has made the argument plainly. European allies are "substantially more powerful than Russia and should take primary responsibility for their own conventional defense" (war.gov). The purpose is to free American assets for a possible conflict with China.

What Money Cannot Buy Fast Enough

Europe can spend more, and it is being told to do so. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that replacing US conventional capabilities in NATO would cost about $1 trillion over 25 years (The National News). The Kiel Institute puts the nearer-term bill at €50 billion a year in additional coordinated spending (Meta-Defense). But some gaps are not solved by signing a larger cheque.

The clearest case is electronic warfare. Only the US operates the EA-18G Growler, the aircraft that jams enemy radar so strike jets can survive in contested airspace. Europe has no equivalent. Without Growlers, European aircraft sent against Russian S-400 and S-500 air defences would face radar networks they cannot suppress (RUSI).

Nuclear-powered attack submarines create the same problem at sea. US Virginia-class boats can stay underwater indefinitely and launch covert cruise-missile strikes from more than 1,500 km away. European diesel-electric submarines must surface every 24 to 72 hours. Only France and the UK operate nuclear attack submarines, and British readiness is badly strained: as of March 2026, just one of five Astute-class boats was operationally deployed (19FortyFive).

The tanker gap tells the same story. The US flies more than 400 aerial refuelling aircraft. All of European NATO combined has roughly 50 to 60 (Defense News).

Thirteen European countries bought F-35s partly as an insurance policy on American commitment. But the aircraft was designed to operate inside a US battle-management system of AWACS, the airborne radar planes, along with Growlers and tankers. Remove that ecosystem and European F-35s are fifth-generation aircraft flying without fifth-generation support (RUSI).

The Industrial Wall

The industrial base is the harder constraint. European fighter production is expected to peak at about 72 aircraft a year by 2030 across the Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen lines. The IISS estimates Europe needs 400 more tactical combat aircraft. Even at maximum output, with no exports, that is more than five years of production.

France’s parliament has approved an extra €36 billion in military spending through 2030 (Le Monde). But the Rafale line is already full with export orders, and French nuclear submarines are sovereign assets, not equipment available for NATO pooling (IFRI).

The pressure lands first on the countries closest to Russia. Poland spends 4.81% of GDP on defence, the highest rate in NATO, yet has no submarines and its F-35s will not reach full capacity until 2030 (Bankier.pl). Finland’s defence minister, Antti Häkkänen, called it "a serious moment for Europe" (IS.fi).

For Ireland, outside NATO but inside the EU, this is the background music to every defence debate now taking shape in Europe. Neutrality does not remove the strategic fact that Europe has relied on American enablers for the hardest parts of modern war. It only makes the political conversation more awkward when EU security policy starts moving faster than Irish comfort with military integration.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte presented the shift as something allies had already priced in: "Everybody knew this was happening" (NATO). Norway’s response was cooler, calling for the transition to happen "in a structured manner" (Le Monde). The Ankara summit on July 7th and 8th will formalise the new burden-sharing plan. The exposed period runs from now until at least 2030. A political promise can be made in a morning. A submarine still takes a decade to build.