Washington Cuts NATO Fighter Pledges

A confidential US document obtained by Germany's Die Welt sets out, line by line, how Washington is reducing the forces it promises to NATO in an emergency. The troops are not being pulled out of European bases. The more serious change is in the reinforcements America had pledged to send when a crisis breaks: forces NATO planners had been able to put into their calculations, and now cannot.

What the leaked list contains

The cuts fall on the NATO Force Model, agreed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is the system that tells NATO which forces each member state will make available, and how quickly: some within 10 days, others within 30 days, and a third tier within six months. Washington filed its revised commitments on May 31.

The list is broad. Fighter aircraft pledges fall by about a third: F-16s go from 99 to 63, and F-15Es from 54 to 36. All KC-46 aerial refuelling tankers, which let combat jets reach distant targets without landing, are removed entirely. Long-range reconnaissance drones are taken out of NATO planning. Armed MQ-9 Reapers, the alliance's standard surveillance-and-strike drones, are halved (Focus.de). At sea, one of two carrier strike groups is withdrawn. Cruise-missile submarines disappear from the list. Maritime patrol aircraft fall from 26 to 15. One of two strategic bomber formations is also removed.

Europe has the planes, not the commitments

NATO officials say no defence gaps are expected. The argument rests on a familiar distinction: Europe has aircraft in national inventories, but not all of them are formally assigned to NATO's crisis tiers. European countries collectively have more fighter jets than Russia. That is not the same as committing them to alliance operations on a fixed deployment schedule.

A formal commitment means funded readiness cycles, trained crews moving through rotations, spare parts, logistics, and a political decision to place forces under alliance planning when a government might prefer to hold them back.

Meta-Defense, a French defence-analysis site, calculates that replacing the withdrawn US conventional strike capacity alone would require 350 to 400 European multirole aircraft formally committed to NATO planning (Meta-Defense).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 on that scale. The cost of maintaining those rotations would fall mainly on the countries with the largest air forces: France, Germany, the UK, and Italy. Washington's reductions are confirmed, itemised, and scheduled. Europe's substitute remains voluntary, uncounted, and dependent on 31 national parliaments.

Nuclear reassurance won't close a conventional gap

As conventional pledges shrink, Washington and Paris are both offering nuclear reassurance. That changes the mood around deterrence, but it does not solve the same problem.

The US is negotiating expanded nuclear sharing, the NATO arrangement under which American B61 nuclear bombs are stored on allied territory and delivered by allied aircraft, with Poland and the Baltic states (Rzeczpospolita, LRT). Lithuania has begun discussing a constitutional amendment to allow nuclear weapons on its territory. Poland has formally proposed hosting a permanent US base (Polsat News).

France is running a separate track. Its "dissuasion avancée", a programme under which Paris extends its nuclear umbrella to partner nations while keeping sole launch authority, now has nine partners after Norway joined in May (Euronews). Poland is pursuing both routes at once, though the American and French systems do not fit neatly together: Washington controls the B61s, Paris controls its own warheads, and there is no mechanism to coordinate the two.

Nuclear deterrence is designed for existential threats. It does not replace the fighter squadrons, tankers, and patrol aircraft NATO needs for conventional operations below the nuclear threshold, where most military crises are likely to sit.

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 in the leaked list, the shortfall becomes the new baseline. Washington has filed its cuts. Europe's answer is still a bundle of intentions, each waiting on a parliament, a budget line, and a political decision that has not yet been made.