Washington Cuts NATO Jets by a Third

A confidential US document obtained by Germany's Die Welt sets out precise cuts to the forces America has promised NATO for an emergency. The troops already stationed in Europe are not being withdrawn. What is being stripped back are the reinforcements Washington had told NATO planners they could count on if a crisis broke out.

What the leaked list contains

The cuts fall on the NATO Force Model, the framework agreed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It tells each member state which forces it must be ready to deploy, and how quickly: some within 10 days, others within 30 days, and a third tier within six months. Washington submitted its revised commitments on 31 May.

The scale is not cosmetic. Fighter aircraft pledges fall by about a third: F-16s go from 99 to 63, F-15Es from 54 to 36. All KC-46 aerial refuelling tankers, the aircraft that allow combat jets to reach distant targets without landing, disappear from the list. Long-range reconnaissance drones are removed from NATO planning. Armed MQ-9 Reapers, among the alliance's main surveillance and strike drones, are cut by half (Focus.de).

At sea, one of two carrier strike groups is pulled. Cruise-missile submarines are removed. Maritime patrol aircraft fall from 26 to 15. One of two strategic bomber formations also goes.

For Malta, formally outside NATO but economically and politically tied to the European security order, this is not someone else's spreadsheet. A weaker US reinforcement promise shifts more responsibility onto Europe, including the EU institutions where Malta does have a seat.

Europe has the planes, not the commitments

NATO officials say they do not expect defence gaps. That reassurance rests on European forces that exist in national inventories but have not been formally assigned to NATO's crisis tiers.

Europe has more fighter jets than Russia. But owning aircraft is not the same as pledging them to alliance operations on a fixed deployment schedule. A commitment means funded readiness cycles, trained crews rotating through deployments, logistics in place, and a political decision to hand over forces a government may want to keep under national command.

Meta-Defense, a French defence-analysis site, calculates that replacing the withdrawn US conventional strike capacity alone would require 350 to 400 European multirole aircraft formally committed to NATO planning (Meta-Defense).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 keeping those rotations alive, from maintenance to training and logistics, 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 is still voluntary, unquantified, and dependent on 31 national parliaments.

Nuclear reassurance will not close a conventional gap

With conventional pledges shrinking, Washington and Paris are offering nuclear reassurance. That answers a different question.

The US is negotiating expanded nuclear sharing, the NATO arrangement under which 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 allow nuclear weapons on its territory. Poland has formally proposed hosting a permanent US base (Polsat News).

France is running a parallel track. Its "dissuasion avancée", a programme through which 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 at once, although the American and French systems do not share a command structure. Washington controls the B61s. Paris controls its own warheads. There is no mechanism to coordinate the two.

Nuclear deterrence is meant to guard against existential threats. It does not replace the fighter squadrons, tankers, and patrol aircraft NATO needs for conventional operations below the nuclear threshold. That grey zone is where most military crises are likely to play out.

Five weeks to Ankara

NATO's summit in Ankara on 7-8 July is the political deadline. If European allies arrive without specific force commitments to fill the gaps in the leaked list, the capability hole becomes the new baseline.

Washington's cuts have been filed. Europe's answer is still a stack of intentions, each waiting for a parliament, a budget line, and a political decision nobody has yet made.