America’s Security Discount Is Ending Too Fast for Allies

The dangerous part of America’s new burden-sharing fight is not the scolding. It is the calendar.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a six-month review of U.S. forces in Europe, saying the process will test whether NATO is moving “fast and irreversibly” toward Europe taking primary responsibility for its own defense, according to Associated Press reporting from Brussels¹. This sounds like a budget argument, and in Washington it often gets flattened into one: Europeans are rich, Americans are tired, everyone should pay up. But that frame misses the military problem. A security guarantee is not a subscription. You cannot simply raise the price and assume the service continues uninterrupted.

I think U.S. allies can build much more of their own deterrent power. I do not think they can do it quickly enough to offset a material U.S. pullback from the high-end capabilities that make NATO and the U.S.-Japan alliance work today. The gap is not mostly a lack of will anymore. It is the harder stuff: air defense, intelligence, targeting, logistics, aerial refueling, strategic lift, command systems, long-range fires, munitions stockpiles and space-based warning. Those are not vibes. They are machines, trained people, doctrine, secure networks, maintenance crews, production lines and political agreements that have to function under attack.

Start with what is actually under review. The United States had roughly 80,000 service members stationed in Europe as of April 2025, with the wartime total since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine ranging from about 75,000 to 105,000, according to the Council on Foreign Relations². Those forces are spread through a web of bases, especially in Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom, and they do more than sit on the map. They provide forward defense, logistics, training, Ukraine support flows and nuclear-related missions, according to the same CFR overview².

The latest U.S. signal goes beyond troop counts. AP reported that NATO’s American supreme allied commander is making backup plans after Washington signaled on June 3 that it would no longer supply an aircraft carrier and support ships, aerial refueling planes and dozens of fighter jets, among other assets, in a crisis; AP described this as the United States scaling back how it might help if NATO’s Article 5 is triggered (Associated Press¹). Article 5 is NATO’s collective-defense clause: an armed attack on one ally is treated as an attack on all, though each ally decides what action it deems necessary, including whether to use armed force, as NATO explains³. That flexibility matters. Article 5 is a promise to respond, not an automatic order of battle.

This is where “burden sharing” becomes more than a slogan. Burden sharing means dividing the cost and work of collective defense among allies. A defense spending target is the numeric benchmark for that effort, usually expressed as a share of gross domestic product. NATO’s old benchmark was 2 percent of GDP. At the 2025 Hague summit, allies committed to invest 5 percent of GDP annually by 2035, with at least 3.5 percent for core defense requirements and NATO capability targets, according to NATO’s spending explainer⁴ and the Hague Summit Declaration⁵. In 2025, all allies met or exceeded the pre-summit 2 percent target, while European allies and Canada raised spending by 20 percent from 2024 and invested more than $574 billion, adjusted to 2021 prices, according to NATO⁴.

That is real money. It is not yet real deterrence.

Deterrence means convincing an adversary that aggression will fail or cost more than it can gain. Force posture means where troops, aircraft, ships, headquarters, sensors, stockpiles and supply routes are placed so that threat is believable. If the U.S. reduces the assets that make alliance war plans executable, allies do not merely need larger budgets. They need a new force posture fast enough that Russia, China or North Korea do not see a cheap window.

Europe’s problem is painfully specific. The International Institute for Strategic Studies argues that a European way of war without the United States would lose or weaken U.S.-provided theater intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, space-based collection, data fusion, deep precision strike, integrated air and missile defense and other connective tissue; IISS says Europe could still pursue a narrower strategy of denying rapid Russian success, but that even by 2027 it would remain less able to synchronize operations at U.S.-enabled speed and scale (IISS⁶). A separate IISS assessment of European military space capacity⁷ is blunter: Europe could not, within a decade, replicate the global scale and persistence of U.S. space-based ISR, field a fully sovereign missile early-warning architecture or match U.S. space situational awareness.

This is the crux. A tank can be bought. A shell factory can be expanded. But an intelligence and targeting ecosystem is a nervous system. It links satellites, aircraft, electronic intercepts, analysts, data networks, commanders and shooters. If that system thins out, weapons become slower and less precise, air defenses get less warning, and commanders see less of the battlefield. A denial posture against Russia still needs the things being repriced.

The best case for optimism is industrial. The European Commission allocated €500 million under the Act in Support of Ammunition Production and said Europe’s 155 mm shell production capacity had reached 1 million rounds annually in January 2024 and was expected to reach 2 million annually by the end of 2025 (European Commission⁸). That shows demand and money can move factories. The European Defence Agency also says EU states signed letters of intent in 2024 on integrated air and missile defense, electronic warfare, loitering munitions and a combat surface vessel, while warning that national efforts alone remain insufficient and that cooperation must reduce fragmentation (European Defence Agency⁹).

But the ammunition example also shows the trap. Capacity is not the same as stockpile depth, and artillery shells are only one slice of modern deterrence. Ukraine is the live stress test. CSIS concluded in 2025 that Europe and Ukraine could not fully replace U.S. capabilities, especially air defense and intelligence support for precision targeting, and warned that any replacement would have to happen before Russia exploited the likely dip in fighting power (CSIS¹⁰). NATO is not Ukraine, but the mechanism is the same. The danger is not that Europe never catches up. The danger is that it catches up after an adversary has already tested the seam.

Japan fits the same pattern in Asia. Tokyo is doing the right things. Japan’s Defense Ministry says its FY2026 budget continues the “fundamental reinforcement” of seven pillars, including stand-off defense, integrated air and missile defense, unmanned systems, cross-domain operations, command-and-control and intelligence, mobility, sustainability and defense production; it also says Japan brought forward the goal of reaching a defense budget level of 2 percent of GDP to FY2025 (Japan Ministry of Defense¹¹). The older Defense Buildup Program said Japan aims by FY2027 to take primary responsibility for dealing with invasions of Japan and defeat them while gaining support from its ally and others (Japan Defense Buildup Program¹²). That phrase is doing a lot of work. Japan is becoming a harder target, especially with standoff missiles and better air and missile defense. It is not designing deterrence without the United States.

The strongest counterargument is that “independent” should not mean “alone.” I agree. Europe does not need to duplicate the U.S. global military to deter Russia, and Japan does not need to become a mini-America to complicate Chinese planning. A Kiel Institute road map argues that Europe has the industrial and financial base to reduce strategic dependencies, estimating a sovereignty agenda at €150 billion to €200 billion by 2030 and roughly €500 billion over a decade, while saying substantial progress is possible in three to five years if Europe makes joint political and industrial choices (Kiel Institute¹³). I buy the direction of travel.

I do not buy the timeline as a substitute for U.S. crisis enablers in 2026, 2027 or 2028. Three to five years is a policy horizon. Deterrence is a daily condition. If Washington uses this review to force allied procurement into shared air defense, shared munitions, shared logistics, shared ISR fusion and common command systems while keeping key U.S. enablers in place until milestones are met, the pressure could make NATO healthier. If Washington withholds those enablers first and asks allies to sprint afterward, it will be repricing the guarantee in the one way that makes the product worse.

My benchmark is simple. By the end of 2028, watch whether Europe can demonstrate, in audited NATO readiness reports and major exercises, that it can sustain a 60-to-90-day high-intensity defense of the eastern flank with European-led ISR fusion, layered air defense, deep fires, tanker access, strategic lift, deployable logistics and munitions stockpiles. Watch whether Japan can show the same kind of resilience in missiles, air defense, joint command and island sustainment without assuming instant U.S. surge capacity. If those tests are not passed, the American backstop will still be the backbone, whatever the budget line says.