The United States will not only reduce its military contingent in Germany, but has also abandoned Biden’s 2024 pledge to deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles there, Politico reports, citing sources.
Among the American units apparently set to be withdrawn is a specialised formation responsible for delivering Tomahawks to Europe.
Politico writes that the plan is “now effectively dead”, and that without Tomahawks Germany and its allies are “left with a hole in their defences—and no quick way to fill it”. Europe has no full substitute for the Tomahawk in terms of range.
A senior NATO diplomat acknowledged that Europe still faces a capability shortfall in the field of “long-range fires”.
Biden had pledged the deployment of these missiles in 2024 to strengthen NATO’s non-nuclear deterrence against Russia, in response to Moscow’s deployment of Iskander systems in Kaliningrad in 2018.
The closest option for Germany is an upgraded Taurus, whose current range is about 500 km.
Berlin halted production of the missile, but plans to resume it in the Taurus Neo version. Even so, the gap between Taurus—and comparable European systems such as the Franco-British SCALP/Storm Shadow—and the Tomahawk remains significant: the Tomahawk has a range of about 1,600 kilometres, whereas Neo is expected by experts to reach around 1,000 kilometres and will not enter service until after 2030.
If Washington refuses to deploy its own systems in Germany, Berlin may try to acquire them on its own.