US Cuts NATO Bombers, Submarines

Bombers halved. Submarines removed. Fighter jets cut by a third. In a closed Brussels meeting in late May, the Pentagon told NATO allies it will sharply reduce the air and naval forces promised for European crisis planning, including the systems that make NATO's defence plans usable in practice.

European allies must now bring gap-filling proposals to a Force Sourcing Conference in early June, where governments formally pledge units against NATO requirements. The political deadline is the Ankara Summit on 7-8 July (Reuters/Der Spiegel, The Deep Dive).

The reductions do not mainly hit troop numbers. They hit the enablers: refuelling tankers, electronic warfare aircraft, reconnaissance drones and attack submarines. Without them, European combat forces look strong on paper but struggle to fight a real war.

The Systems That Make Everything Else Work

The NATO Force Model, agreed at the 2022 Madrid Summit, pre-assigns 800,000 troops across three readiness tiers to regional defence plans. Those plans, approved at the 2023 Vilnius Summit, cover the Baltic, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They were written on the assumption that American enablers would be there (NATO).

That matters even for Malta, which is outside NATO but lives inside the same European security map. The Mediterranean plan is not an abstract file in Brussels. It covers the sea space through which energy, trade, migration pressures and military risk all pass before they reach a Maltese port or a Cabinet meeting in Castille.

The military mechanism is simple. Fighter jets need tankers to cross distance. Aircraft need electronic warfare support to survive Russian air defences. Naval groups rely on attack submarines to protect them below the surface. These are the categories Washington is now pulling back.

The Pentagon briefing was delivered to NATO political directors by a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A NATO spokeswoman acknowledged an "over-reliance on the US in NATO force planning" and said military responsibilities could be "reorganised" (TRT World/Reuters).

The Arithmetic of Incapacity

Europe operates roughly 60 aerial refuelling tankers. The US has 610, a 10:1 ratio (Aerospace Global News). Europe has zero strategic bombers.

The closest European equivalent is a French Rafale carrying missiles with a 500-km range. A B-52 can strike from 8,000 miles and remain over a theatre for twenty hours (ISS Europa).

The most serious gap may be suppression of enemy air defences. In plain English, that is the ability to destroy Russia's anti-aircraft systems so allied aircraft can operate. A Belgian defence researcher told Defence News that European air forces have "quite simply abandoned" this domain "and must now rebuild from scratch."

Three of sixteen analysts surveyed said reconstruction could take more than a decade (Defence News).

A May 2026 Kiel Institute study put the cost of European strategic autonomy at around €500 billion over ten years. That is about €50 billion a year, or 0.25% of European GDP (Kiel/Defence News).

The harder constraint is not the money. It is production. Airbus is considering higher tanker output, not confirming it. NATO's replacement for its retiring airborne radar fleet still has no signed contract. The first European long-range strike missile is not due before 2029.

Two Books, One Alliance

SACEUR, NATO's top military commander, General Alexus Grynkewich told allied chiefs of defence on 19 May that the US drawdown "does not impact the executability of our regional plans" (NATO). His reassurance dealt with the troop reduction announced earlier, not the enabler cuts disclosed days later.

His caveat was the important part. The US would limit itself to providing "only those critical capabilities that allies cannot yet provide." The systems now being withdrawn are precisely those capabilities.

The dependency runs deeper than this one briefing. European allies have bought American weapons systems at record rates: F-35s, Patriot batteries and HIMARS launchers. US Foreign Military Sales took 50.7% of European equipment budgets in 2022-2024, up from 27.8% three years earlier (Bruegel).

Those purchases were partly political insurance: buy American equipment, keep America engaged. Washington is now reducing the operational commitments those systems were bought to complement, while Europe has become more dependent on US hardware. ECFR warns that a Russian intelligence picture of NATO as "frail and divided" is the condition most likely to trigger miscalculation (ECFR).

What Ankara Cannot Resolve

The Ankara Summit can endorse spending targets and capability pledges. It cannot build tankers, train electronic warfare crews or put satellites into orbit.

The formal US pledges will be tabled at the June Force Sourcing Conference. Until then, exact numbers remain classified. No allied official has publicly said whether the Vilnius defence plans remain executable under the revised Force Model; the question has been avoided in press conferences.

That is the real gap. Leaders can promise a more European defence posture in July. The factories, crews and systems needed to make it credible stretch years into the 2030s.