Pentagon to Slash NATO Force Commitment Before July Summit
Three anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the matter told media the announcement is slated for a defense policy chiefs' gathering in Brussels on May 22. Washington is expected to send Alex Velez-Green, a senior aide to Undersecretary of War Elbridge Colby, as its representative at the meeting.
Reconfiguring the NATO Force Model has emerged as a central objective for Colby's team in the run-up to the alliance's next leaders' summit, scheduled for Türkiye this July. While Colby has consistently pressed European allies to assume greater responsibility for conventional military capabilities, he has simultaneously stated that the US would "strenuously oppose" European efforts to develop independent nuclear arsenals as a substitute for the American nuclear umbrella.
The disclosure lands against a backdrop of accelerating US military retrenchment across Europe, where over 80,000 American troops were deployed in 2025 — a posture rooted in a decades-long framework of collective territorial defense and deterrence stretching back to the aftermath of World War II.
The White House has reportedly compiled a NATO "naughty and nice" list, designed to reward member states that backed the US-Israeli campaign against Iran and penalise those that did not — mechanisms reportedly include troop redeployments, scaled-back joint exercises, and curtailed military cooperation.
The Pentagon's recent moves have given those concerns tangible form. Earlier this month, it scrapped a planned rotation of 4,000 troops into Poland, days after announcing the withdrawal of 5,000 soldiers from Germany. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has further reportedly axed the deployment to Germany of a battalion specialised in long-range missile systems.
The pullback exposes a structural vulnerability among European NATO members, who remain critically reliant on Washington for intelligence satellites, long-range strike capabilities, heavy airlift operations, and undersea warfare assets — even as European defence budgets have surged sharply in recent years, driven largely by warnings of an imminent Russian threat.
Moscow, for its part, has fiercely condemned Europe's accelerating militarisation, contending that Western governments are exploiting "ostentatious Russophobia" to legitimise transforming the EU into an armed bloc while deflecting public attention from deepening domestic crises.
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