[…] Secondly, US policymakers from across the political spectrum are increasingly focusing their foreign and security policy on the Indo-Pacific and the US competition with China. Despite the war in Ukraine and the threat from Russia, Europe is no longer the pacing theatre that frames US defence planning priorities and receives the largest allocation of resources. For the 2024 fiscal year, and as war raged on in Ukraine, the Pentagon allocated $3.6 billion from its budget to the “European Deterrence Initiative”, while the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” was allotted $14.7 billion. This China-first approach not only creates competition for America’s finite military resources, it also prepares the US for a different sort of competition with an emerging superpower, focused primarily in the air, maritime, space, cyber, and technology domains. Accordingly, the US will likely develop and prioritise capabilities more adapted to the Pacific theatre, for instance in terms of range.
Finally, the US presence in Europe has been continuously declining since the end of the cold war, with a small but significant rebound associated with Russia’s war on Ukraine. At the peak of US deployment to Europe in the late 1950s, 430,000 US troops were stationed in Europe, mostly in West Germany. In 1989, there were still 248,000 US troops in Europe, but this figure had fallen to 64,000 by 2021. Since February 2022, the number of US troops in Europe has surged to 85,000-100,000 (depending on their rotational presence) – still far from the average number of 300,000 throughout the cold war. European armies have a total of 1.9 million military personnel (1.33 million in the EU alone) by comparison. This decline in US force presence has been accompanied by a reduction in the number of major combat platforms – including fighter aircraft, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and artillery, as well as nuclear weapons – assigned to the US European Command. […]
European efforts to reinvest in defence have been genuine and significant since 2014 and have dramatically accelerated since February 2022. According to NATO estimates for 2024, EU member states and European NATO allies are now spending €150 billion more per year on defence than they did in 2014. This trend seems to be stable despite significant differences between European countries.
The EU has morphed into a defence player, mobilising resources to train and equip Ukrainian forces, and supporting European defence research and capability development. Since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Europe’s defence industry has increased its ammunition production capacity by 50 per cent and aims to produce over 2 million shells per year by the end of 2025 – double its capacity in February 2022. Läs artikel