Donald Trump Pulling US Troops From Europe in Blow to NATO Allies: Report
Donald Trump Pulling US Troops From Europe in Blow to NATO Allies: Report
President also plans to ask for "financial contribution" for maintenance of remaining troops, European diplomatic source said.
President Donald Trump plans to pull about 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe, according to a leading Italian news agency.
A European diplomatic source told ANSA that Trump, who entered office on Monday for a second term, wants to reduce the American contingent in Europe by about 20 percent and plans to ask for a "financial contribution" for the maintenance of the remaining troops.
You're viewing a single thread.
I say pull them all, that would cripple their power projection towards Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and move forward with the creation of a EU Army.
Maybe. I think this supports Putin's goals more than anything.
Something to keep an eye on is the AEGIS Ashore platforms in Poland and Romania. These are ICBM tracking and interception facilities, part of the US MDA's Missile Defense System, and their specific purpose in being where they are is to defend Europe from Russian missiles. You can bet Putin would love to see them gone. If you see any news about reduced US military or MDA presence in those countries, you should be worried.
Germany is buying Arrow3, which is anti ICBM.
So having an interceptor is good, definitely the sites in Poland and Romania don't really provide enough coverage. But, the interceptor is only one part of the defense. Before you can use it, you need an early-warning sensor which can spot the flare of a missile launch on the ground (or at sea) - most effectively done with a network of observation satellites. Then that sensor needs to hand off its data to a tracking radar system - preferably one that can track the missile from its boost phase through the atmosphere all the way up into its sub-orbital path. You will probably need several different radar systems at different locations with different angles and ranges to do this effectively (all actively sharing data with each other).
Modern ICBMs are nasty things with multiple warheads and also multiple decoy warheads, and they're constantly dropping off empty fuel tanks and cowlings and other bits of hardware to shed weight during flight, so you need a highly sensitive radar to discriminate among the various debris and identify the real warhead(s). Once you've got that, you can track it for a bit to determine its trajectory and then you can feed that data to an interceptor system to hit it.
Also, explosions aren't worth much in space so your typical interceptor uses a "kinetic warhead" which is basically just a solid chunk of metal (it's a guided, rocket-powered bullet). You have to hit the target directly. If you miss by half a meter, you missed.
All of this identification, tracking, discrimination, targetting and intercepting needs to happen within the very few minutes of the ICBM's flight path, preferably before the warheads separate and spread out. The point being, it's a very difficult thing to actually accomplish and requires a lot of precision, and many different technologies working together in real-time, which is why I say that the MDA's current system couldn't be replaced in less than 20 years.
Yes, but only if the EU doesn't immediately replace the vacuum with their own forces.
(Do any of the EU nations have nukes that aren't owned by the US? Sadly such a deterrent is probably a requirement.)
(Do any of the EU nations have nukes that aren't owned by the US? Sadly such a deterrent is probably a requirement.<
European Nations have sufficient Nukes as a deterrent. Well I reckon one nuke plus their warheads would incapacitate most cities. There are like 500-600 officially between UK and France.
We've seen war between nuclear nations. It's not necessarily a deterrent from war. Russia is not using nukes against Ukraine either. It's merely a deterrent from escalation to that degree.
We've seen war between nuclear nation
Ofcourse, having nukes is not a guarantee, but highly increases deterrence. Also, most wars we've seen are cold wars and or proxy wars though.
Ukraine had a huge nuclear arsenal (third in the world), which it then ceded to Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum Kyiv post.
I've added some information to my previous comment. Europe might be able to replace the conventional forces, but my concern would be the ICBM defense capabilities. The US MDA has a lot of infrastructure in Europe, and that system has been fantastically expensive to develop and required decades of research and engineering build, and I doubt it can be replaced in less than 20 years.
Good to know. That's worrying indeed.