An U.S. Army helicopter is unloaded from an C-5M Galaxy at Ramstein Air Base, southwest of Frankfurt, amid NATO’s Operation Atlantic Resolve in 2017. Home to around 27,000 troops and their families, “Little America” has been the headquarters for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and a critical NATO facility since 1952. File Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Timothy Moore
April 30 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans that could see cuts to the tens of thousands of U.S. forces stationed across 20 bases in Germany.
Writing on his Truth Social platform Wednesday night, Trump said the process of scaling back the United States’ eight-decade-long military presence was already underway.
“The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time,” Trump wrote.
The announcement came two days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Iran was running circles around the United States in ongoing peace negotiations to end the military conflict, saying “the Americans clearly have no strategy.”
Lack of support for the war from European NATO allies has seen Trump and other senior U.S. officials repeatedly threaten to pull out of the 32-country defensive alliance, complaining that Europe was “freeriding” and never there for the United States when it needed it.
On Friday, a Pentagon leak suggested that Spain could face being suspended from NATO in retaliation for not supporting the United States in its war with Iran.
U.S. troop strength in Germany stood at 36,436, mainly army and air force personnel, stationed at 20 bases across the country in December, the latest month for which U.S. Department of Defense data is available.
That compares with around 28,000 across the rest of Europe, with the bulk of those deployed in Italy, Britain and Spain.
Active-duty personnel numbers in Germany were cut from more than 50,000 from 2013 to 2017 during President Barack Obama‘s second term, in line with a strategic shift in the United States’ defense priorities involving pivoting to the Asia-Pacific and reducing the focus on Europe.
Before that, numbers had fallen to 94,000 in the first half of the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and then down to 71,000.
The United States currently has more than 54,000 troops in Japan, another 23,500 in South Korea and 7,000 in Guam.
There has been a continuous significant U.S. military presence in Germany since the end of World War II, initially as an army of occupation and then as the front-line of NATO deterrence during the Cold War and more recently as a bulwark against a resurgent threat to Europe from Russia.
