• The U.S. is reducing its force contributions to NATO's crisis pool, cutting fighters, drones, and naval assets.
  • European allies and Canada are urged to fill the gaps, particularly in air and naval power.
  • The move reflects a strategic shift to free up U.S. resources for other global priorities.

A Strategic Rebalance

The United States will continue to provide critical but more limited capabilities to NATO, according to General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe. The U.S. has reduced the forces it makes available to NATO’s force model, the pool of national forces the alliance could call upon in a crisis. The cutbacks span air-refueling aircraft, fighter aircraft, drones, maritime patrol assets, naval vessels, submarines, and an aircraft-carrier strike group, according to people familiar with the matter.

Reuters reported that the U.S.-designated force pool would include about one-third fewer F-15/F-15E fighters—falling to 99—and half as many MQ-4/MQ-9 drones, to 12. The exact wider package has not been publicly disclosed. Grynkewich has framed the remaining U.S. contribution as “limited but critical.”

Europe Asked to Step Up

Grynkewich has asked European allies and Canada to step up particularly with manned and unmanned aircraft and naval vessels. NATO’s military headquarters says it does not expect defense gaps in the named areas because allies either already possess, or will soon possess, sufficient capabilities. The U.S. is not withdrawing from NATO’s command structure or collective defense. It continues to supply capabilities that are difficult for most European allies to replicate quickly, including elements of strategic deterrence, targeting-enabling space capabilities, intelligence and command functions, and other scarce high-end assets.

This is not a corporate story; it is a strategic and defense-industrial development. The financial scale is already moving sharply upward. At the 2025 Hague summit, allies committed to invest 5% of GDP annually by 2035 in defense and security-related needs: at least 3.5% for core defense and up to 1.5% for resilience, infrastructure, innovation, and defense-industrial capacity. European allies and Canada increased defense spending by roughly 20% in 2025 versus 2024, or more than USD 90 billion in 2021 prices, according to NATO.

That expansion can boost defense manufacturing and related high-technology investment, but it also creates fiscal tradeoffs. Governments may have to finance higher military outlays through reallocations, borrowing, tax changes, or cuts to other priorities. It may also expose bottlenecks in skilled labor, explosive-material supply, components, shipbuilding capacity, testing, and certification.

Political and Strategic Context

The immediate policy context is Washington’s push for greater European burden-sharing, combined with the U.S. desire to preserve finite high-end forces for global contingencies. The change reflects an explicit U.S. message that European security cannot depend indefinitely on the assumption that all U.S. assets will be available at the moment of crisis. Grynkewich has said this gives allies a more realistic indication of what they must provide themselves.

The strategic backdrop includes Russia’s continuing long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security, which NATO identified in the Hague declaration as a principal security concern. The war in Ukraine has reinforced the importance of integrated air and missile defense, drones, counter-drone systems, long-range fires, resilience, and ammunition stockpiles. NATO is also updating integrated air-and-missile-defense planning using lessons from Ukraine and other recent conflicts. Grynkewich said NATO was rewriting standing alliance-wide plans for this mission, an undertaking not done for decades.

Competition for U.S. military resources is another factor. The United States is balancing commitments in Europe with its China-focused Indo-Pacific strategy, as well as requirements in the Middle East.

The alliance’s legal core remains unchanged: NATO members reaffirmed their “ironclad commitment” to Article 5 collective defense at The Hague. However, Article 5 is a political and military commitment, not a guarantee that each ally will deploy identical capabilities or quantities of forces in every contingency. NATO itself owns few forces; member states contribute personnel and equipment from their national militaries.

Implications and Outlook

European governments and militaries face the most immediate operational burden. They must decide which national capabilities to place under NATO plans, obtain political approval for higher spending, and convert commitments into deployable forces. The United States gains flexibility to allocate aircraft, ships, tankers, and intelligence-related capabilities across multiple theaters. The risk is that a reduced visible U.S. contribution could unsettle allies if European replacement capacity is delayed.

Defense companies and workers may benefit from sustained orders, but rapid expansion is constrained by production lead times and supply chains. Complex platforms such as tankers, maritime patrol aircraft, submarines, frigates, and advanced air defenses cannot be replaced quickly. Citizens and taxpayers will face the public-policy tradeoff: stronger deterrence and defense readiness versus substantial long-term expenditure. Debate is likely to focus on affordability, how quickly 5%-of-GDP targets can be met, national sovereignty over deployed forces, and whether Europe can become more capable without duplicating U.S. systems inefficiently.

For decades, the U.S. military has provided many of NATO’s most scarce “enabling” capabilities—strategic lift, intelligence and surveillance, aerial refueling, precision targeting, command-and-control, air and missile defense, and naval power. European dependence on those assets became a recurring issue after the Cold War, particularly during NATO’s Libya operation in 2011, when European allies relied heavily on U.S. support functions. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea prompted NATO’s prior benchmark of spending 2% of GDP on defense. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 accelerated the shift toward deterrence, readiness, stockpiles, and industrial production. The 2025 Hague agreement raised the benchmark to 5% of GDP by 2035, formalizing a much larger European role in alliance defense.

What is particularly notable now is not simply that the U.S. wants allies to spend more, but that Washington is apparently defining in advance which American forces may be unavailable to NATO. Grynkewich described this as a break from the former pattern in which the U.S. would indicate broad availability and decide later, during a crisis, what it could contribute.

Short term, NATO will test whether European and Canadian air and naval contributions can fill the designated gaps without impairing deterrence on the eastern flank. Likely priorities include drones, air defense, air-to-air refueling, maritime surveillance, long-range fires, munitions, anti-submarine warfare, and logistics. Medium term, the key issue is implementation. A spending pledge does not automatically create usable military capability; NATO needs platforms, munitions, trained crews, basing access, maintenance, data links, command arrangements, and regular exercises. The alliance’s ability to integrate national assets will be as important as the headline spending totals. Long term, if the transition succeeds, NATO could become a more balanced alliance, with Europe carrying substantially more responsibility for conventional defense while the U.S. retains a critical strategic and technological role. If it stalls, the risk is a capability gap during the period when U.S. allocations shrink faster than European forces become operational.

The clearest near-term indicator will be whether allied governments turn their new defense-spending commitments into concrete, NATO-assigned aircraft, ships, air-defense units, munitions stocks, and deployable support infrastructure. NATO reports that the spending trajectory has begun to move upward, but the practical test is whether those resources arrive in the right form and on the required timelines.