Pentagon Notifies NATO Allies of Planned Cuts to U.S. Force Contributions

The Trump administration has formally notified NATO allies that the United States intends to reduce the number of strategic bombers, fighter jets, armed drones, destroyers, and submarines it commits to the alliance's standing force pool. Pentagon adviser Alexander Velez-Green delivered the notification during a closed-door meeting of NATO policy directors on Friday, a disclosure confirmed by chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. Velez-Green serves as a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Parnell characterized the announcement as changes to U.S. contributions to the NATO Force Model and described them as "an opportunity for allies to demonstrate that they have heard President Trump's call for them to step up and take primary responsibility for Europe's conventional defense."

The scope of the proposed drawdown spans every major conventional category within the NATO Force Model, the structured framework through which member states pledge discrete military assets for alliance use in a crisis. According to Der Spiegel, which first reported the specifics, the reductions would include cutting the U.S. fighter-aircraft contribution by roughly one-third and significantly reducing strategic bomber commitments. The U.S. Navy would make fewer destroyers available to NATO, the U.S. no longer intends to provide any submarines to the alliance, and Europe would be expected to supply its own reconnaissance drones while Washington sharply curtails its armed-drone contributions. ^[1][2] Washington has not placed a timeline on the reductions, and the precise composition of the revised commitment remains classified. Reuters reported that the Pentagon has decided to significantly scale down its commitment, though several details, including the pace at which crisis responsibilities will shift to European allies, remain unclear. ^[1] Consistent with prior administration statements, the U.S. gave assurances that its nuclear deterrence posture within NATO will not change. What remains untouched, according to reporting on the briefing, is nuclear deterrence.

NATO spokesperson Allison Hart acknowledged the shift while framing it in structural terms. A NATO spokeswoman told Der Spiegel that there had been an "over-reliance" on the U.S. in NATO force planning and that, with Europe and Canada investing more in defense, military responsibilities within the alliance could be reorganized. ^[1] NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has separately stated that NATO's over-reliance on one ally is "simply not healthy" for the alliance. The formal legal architecture underpinning the burden-sharing debate is Article 3 of the Washington Treaty, which requires member states to maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack. At the June 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies committed to investing 5 percent of GDP annually on core defense requirements and defense- and security-related spending by 2035, explicitly grounding that pledge in Article 3 obligations. ^[3] By 2025, all allies met or exceeded the 2 percent GDP threshold for the first time, and European allies and Canada achieved a 20 percent increase in defense spending compared to 2024. ^[3]

Despite that progress, the U.S. share of alliance spending remains dominant. The United States accounted for an estimated $980 billion in defense spending in 2025, compared with $92.8 billion for the United Kingdom and $68.9 billion for France, according to Atlantic Council estimates. A peer-reviewed analysis published in 2025 found that the Gini coefficient for NATO spending outlays remains persistently high, with the United States continuing to contribute around two-thirds of the alliance's total spending. That asymmetry forms the structural predicate for the Pentagon's stated rationale: that reducing U.S. contributions will compel European members to close identified capability gaps rather than rely on Washington as a residual provider.

The administration's timeline indicates that allied governments have little runway to respond. The U.S. expects formal offers at the Force Sourcing Conference in early June, where member states will be asked to detail which assets they can provide and on what timeline. ^[1][2] Washington intends to present its full burden-sharing overhaul at the NATO summit in Ankara in July. The Friday meeting in Brussels was therefore less a consultation than an advance notice ahead of a forced-generation accounting. The Force Sourcing Conference represents the operational mechanism through which the reallocation becomes concrete: nations that cannot or do not pledge replacement capabilities will leave gaps in approved alliance war plans. President Trump has previously pledged to withdraw thousands of troops from Germany and has maintained sustained pressure on European governments to increase defense investment, a posture that the Pentagon's latest notification formalizes at the platform-commitment level.

The drawdown announcement sits within a broader strategic reorientation that administration officials have signaled since early 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Adviser, met NATO counterparts in Sweden and pointed to U.S. commitments in the Indo-Pacific, the Western Hemisphere, and the Middle East as competing demands on American resources. The practical implication for alliance planners is that the United States is explicitly decoupling its conventional force posture in Europe from the open-ended commitments that have defined NATO burden-sharing since the Cold War. How quickly European members can source replacement submarines, bombers, and drone assets, and at what cost to their own fiscal trajectories under the 5 percent GDP pledge, will determine whether the NATO Force Model retains credible deterrence value before the July summit in Ankara.

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