Why does the US have military bases in Germany — and will Trump follow through on his threat to cut numbers?

Why does the US have military bases in Germany – and will Trump follow through on his threat to cut numbers?

Five of the seven US army garrisons in Europe are in Germany (the others are in Belgium and Italy). Besides Stuttgart, the biggest US installations include the huge Ramstein airbase. File picture

Donald Trump has said the US is “studying and reviewing the possible reduction” of its troops stationed in Germany, days after the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, suggested Washington was being outplayed and “humiliated” by Iran.

The US president said a “determination” on the US military presence in Germany, seen as a key part of Nato’s defences but also vital for the projection of US power in other parts of the world, would be made “over the next short period of time”.

Here’s a brief look at why the US has military bases in Germany, what role they play, and how Trump’s threat to wind them down – the latest of many, dating back to his first term – may not appeal much to the Pentagon or the state department.

Why does the US have military bases in Germany?

The US military footprint in Germany dates back to the second world war in 1945. When the Nazi regime surrendered there were 1.6m US troops in the country, a number that fell within a year to fewer than 300,000, mainly managing the American zone of occupation.

The US presence continued to shrink until the cold war, when the mission evolved from denazification to rebuilding Germany as a bulwark against the USSR. Bases became permanent fixtures with the foundation of Nato and the FRG (West Germany) in 1949.

At the peak of the cold war the US operated about 50 major bases and more than 800 sites in Germany, ranging from huge airfields and barracks to listening posts. Many have closed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR two years later.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s US troop numbers in Germany often exceeded 250,000, with hundreds of thousands more family members living in and around bases that came to resemble self-contained American towns with their own schools, stores and cinemas.

How big are they and what do they do?

According to US Defense Manpower Data Center, at the end of last year the US military had 68,000 active-duty military personnel assigned permanently in its overseas bases in Europe, with just over half – about 36,400 – stationed in Germany.

They are spread across 20 to 40 bases (the number depends on how “base” is defined), including the Stuttgart HQs of European Command (EUCOM) and Africa Command (AFRICOM), which coordinate the operations of all US military forces on two continents.

Crew members of a C-17 begins to unload a plane load of baby formula at the Indianapolis International Airport in Indianapolis, Sunday, May 22, 2022. The 132 pallets of Nestlé Health Science Alfamino Infant and Alfamino Junior formula arrived from Ramstein Air Base in Germany (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Five of the seven US army garrisons in Europe are in Germany (the others are in Belgium and Italy). Besides Stuttgart, the biggest US installations include the huge Ramstein airbase, the HQ for US air forces in Europe (USAFE), which houses 8,500 air force personnel.

Grafenwöhr, Vilseck and Hohenfels, run by the Bavaria garrison, are part of the US military’s largest training area in Europe, while the Wiesbaden garrison is US army Europe and Africa’s HQ. Landstuhl medical centre is the largest US military hospital outside the US.

The role of the bases has changed radically since the cold war: they have become vital forward-staging sites and logistical hubs for US military operations, launching and supporting US wars including in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Iran.

Has Trump made similar threats before?

Yes, more than once. In 2020 during his first term in the White House, apparently infuriated by Germany’s low defence spending and support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, he called Germany “delinquent” and said he would slash US troop numbers there by a third.

Trump’s announcement gave no details whatsoever and appeared to take both the Pentagon and the state department, not to mention their counterparts in Berlin and senior Nato officials, completely by surprise. None were reportedly informed of the decision.

Trump’s plan was to send some of the troops home and redeploy others to countries such as Poland and Italy. But it faced bipartisan pushback in Congress, and huge logistical hurdles. President Joe Biden froze the putative plan in February 2021 and later officially cancelled it.

Is this one likely to be any different?

The obstacles to a major US troop drawdown from Germany remain.

As Anitta Hipper, the European Commission’s security and foreign affairs spokesperson, put it on Thursday, while the US was “a vital partner in Europe’s security and defence”, the deployment of US troops in Europe “is also in the US interest in support of its global role”.

Jeff Rathke of the American-German Institute at Johns Hopkins University made the same point, saying the US benefited greatly from having a forward presence at bases such as Ramstein, without which many of its operations would be immeasurably harder.

“US forces in Europe are not a charitable contribution to ungrateful Europeans – they are an instrument of America’s global military reach,” he said. The deal, in short, is: the US helps defend Europe; Europe provides an infrastructure for America’s global military operations.

In principle, the US military could switch troops around in Europe: it currently has about 13,000 in Italy, 10,000 in the UK and 4,000 in Spain. Under the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), however, it cannot let them fall permanently below 75,000.

But defence analysts note that substantive personnel reductions at bases such as Stuttgart and Ramstein, which have developed over several decades to become vital strategic hubs for the Pentagon’s operations, would come at huge cost to US military reach.