While negotiations over the exact language continue, Austin said the pledge would emerge from a meeting of NATO members at their summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in July. NATO members, he said, are “upgrading our defense plans, putting more forces at higher levels of readiness.”

“In Vilnius, our leaders will agree on a new defense investment pledge to ensure that the alliance has the resources to carry out these new plans,” Austin told reporters after a meeting of NATO defense ministers. “We look forward to working with our valued allies to ensure that we all do even more to invest in our shared security.”

NATO allies agreed in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, to halt the spending cuts they had made after the Cold War and move toward spending 2% of GDP on defense by 2024. That pledge is due next year, and while NATO is working on a new target, some officials said there wasn’t a firm agreement.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday urged the 30 member countries to commit to spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product, or GDP, on defense by a set date. The comments came after Stoltenberg chaired a meeting of NATO defense ministers, where a first high-level discussion on the issue was held.

“What is obvious is that if it was right to commit to spend 2% in 2014, it is even more right now because we live in a more dangerous world,” Stoltenberg said.

“There is a full-fledged war going on in Ukraine, in Europe, and then we see the persistent threat of terrorism and we see also the challenges that China is posing to our security. So it is obvious we need to spend more,” he said.

Only nine countries met the pledge, according to NATO estimates for last year, but 18 have plans to do so. The U.S. spends 3.47% of its GDP on defense, spending more than all other allies combined.

“I think we should move from regarding the 2% as a ceiling, to regard the 2% of GDP as a floor and minimum,” Stoltenberg said. He added that this should not be a “long term perspective” and “that we need immediate commitment to spend 2% as a minimum when we see the needs for ammunition, for air defense, for training, for readiness, for high-end capabilities.”

According to a defense official from a NATO ally in Europe, there was consensus among leaders that 2% is a floor, but it’s unlikely that the Vilnius summit will yield an increase in percentage. Allies may instead agree repeating the 2% pledge, but in stronger terms.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters in Brussels that Berlin would consider the existing pledge as a “base” from which to grow future spending, though details have yet to be agreed within Germany’s coalition government.

Germany’s share of defense spending currently hovers around 1.3% to 1.4%, and the country’s spending profile makes meeting even the existing goal in time doubtful. Expenditures have risen steadily in recent years, to now roughly €50 billion per year, or $53 billion, plus a €100 billion special defense fund created after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The special fund is largely spoken for with big-ticket investments including F-35s and the replenishment of soldier equipment, ammunition and weapon stocks. Analysts have said the base budget, deliberately kept flat while the multiyear special fund is in effect, must also grow to enable a wholesale rejuvenation of Germany’s defense posture.

Discussions about a more significant spending uptick in Germany are always tied to the question of how the country’s defense bureaucracy and industry can translate potentially tens of billions of additional euros into actual capabilities.

While former U.S. President Donald Trump pressed the issue of burden sharing in aggressive terms, the Biden administration has taken a more encouraging tack while also emphasizing NATO unity. President Joe Biden, in a speech at last year’s summit in Madrid, hailed countries by name that were meeting or intending to meet the 2% target.

NATO leaders at the ministerial also discussed plans to implement new stockpile guidelines, aimed at boosting allied arsenals while continuing to fill Kyiv’s. On Wednesday, Stoltenberg said the NATO leaders addressed ways to boost industrial capacity and replenish stockpiles of armaments and munitions sent to Ukraine.

“NATO Allies are providing unprecedented support to help Ukraine push back against Russia’s aggression. At the same time, this is consuming an enormous quantity of Allied ammunition, and depleting our stockpiles,” Stoltenberg said. “Allies agree on the need to work hand-in-hand with the defense industry to ramp up our industrial capacity.”

To that end, the U.S. has been leading talks among NATO’s national armaments directors.

“As we rush to support Ukraine in the critical months ahead, we must all replenish our stockpiles to strengthen our deterrence and defense for the long term,” Austin said.

With reporting by The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON and ROME — Germany’s promise early this year to send tanks to Ukraine marked the country’s latest concession and provided a cap to the gradual escalation in the kind of equipment allies were supplying.

Indeed, when Russia invaded Ukraine last February, its allies resisted pleas for offensive aid and followed a narrow definition of protective equipment. In Berlin, leaders initially shied away from aid that didn’t fit the German definition of “defensive.”

That’s changed, with Germany now pledging to deliver Leopard 2 battle tanks and approving other countries’ requests to follow suit. Chancellor Olaf Scholz also recently authorized supplying infantry fighting vehicles to help push Russian forces out of occupied Ukraine.

The evolving approach fits a conflict as fluid as it is unpredictable.

Now, a collection of Western tank-type vehicles is slated to arrive on the front lines this spring, with training already underway in donor countries. The vehicles carry the hope of enabling battlefield wins for Ukrainian forces that will lead to some kind of war-ending scenario — if the weapons arrive in time.

Scholz has told Tagesspiegel newspaper he wants Russian President Vladimir Putin to answer one question: “How is the world getting out of this terrible situation?”

Defense News spoke with national security analysts, lawmakers and retired officials, asking each how the conflict could end.

Their answers are glum: The war will be expensive, cost lives and likely last at least a few years — or even become interminable. It will tax the American and European defense industries, especially when it comes to munitions, and could cause economic ruin in Russia. All this while the possibility of nuclear escalation remains.

And they said winning will depend on a Congress with the resolve to ensure continued support to Ukraine. But even then, the very concept of victory may be inaccurate, they warned.

“For this year, it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from all — every inch of Ukraine or Russian-occupied Ukraine,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters during a visit to Germany last month. “That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but it’d be very, very difficult.”

Milley has insisted the war will likely end at the negotiating table — at some point. Officials and experts expect a bloody spring, as Russia sends new conscripts to the front line and Ukraine tries to repel an offensive while mounting its own.

As the war enters its second year, the spigot of military aid is still gushing. But industrial capacities are spotty, and nations have started to scrutinize how much equipment they can spare while maintaining their own self-defense requirements and that of NATO.

At the same time, election season in the United States — Ukraine’s most important backer — stands to spur arguments that a war in Europe of unknown duration is a costly nuisance for America.

How long a war?

Asked about the likely duration of the Ukraine war, analysts in the United States and Europe made similar predictions, with timelines running from months to years to “indefinite.”

Yohann Michel, a research analyst in Berlin with the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, anticipates “long months” ahead, while Michael Kofman, the research program director in the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, expects additional years of fighting.

“Wars typically tend to go on longer than people expect or hope, but especially interstate conflicts of this length,” Kofman said. “History tells us that wars which go on this long … are likely to become protracted, lasting several years.”

Perhaps Italian analyst Lucio Caracciolo was the most pessimistic of all. “This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires,” he said.

“It will only stop when Ukraine or Russia or both collapse, since for both sides this is a matter of life or death,” added Caracciolo, the editor of Italian geopolitics publication Limes.

Peter Roberts, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said there are different ways to define the end of a war: “the end of the kinetic phase” versus “the end of a Georgia-style frozen conflict or a Korea-like situation that runs for years.”

“I would love to think the kinetic phase could end in 2023, but I suspect we could be looking at another three years with this scale of fighting,” Roberts said.

Michel added there are as-yet-unknown factors that will determine the end of the conflict.

“Who will be first to launch the next offense? What role will the weather play?” he wondered. “There is the problem of ammunition — the first side to have a shortage will be in trouble. While there has been no real European program to increase production, will Russian stocks be replenished by China?”

And long, exhaustive fighting carries its own risks, according to Benjamin Jensen, a war gaming expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That’s because the longer conflicts last, the more they exhaust finite resources and, hence, the parties are more willing to gamble.

“Even technologically advanced, wealthy states in the Middle East eventually reached a point where they’re lobbing missiles at civilian cities, openly using chemical weapons and fighting in waves — just people rushing across the field getting shot at,” Jensen said.

Either side may act boldly if it winds up on the ropes and needs an exit strategy. Ukraine, Jensen suggested, might try a spectacular special operation to assassinate a Kremlin official, or Russia could decide to use — or simply test — nuclear weapons.

In Jensen’s view, even the collapse of Russia’s conventional force or a traditional Ukrainian victory may not mean the war is over; either could lead to nuclear escalation by Russia.

On the offensive this spring

On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian forces attacked Ukraine without frozen ground to support their armored vehicles, which meant they had to stick to roads, where they stood out as easy targets.

But this winter, they’re expected to launch attacks across open plains, which would be harder to defeat, said Daniel Rice, a former U.S. Army captain who last year became a special adviser to Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian military.

“The worry is that a large Russian offensive action could punch through, and there’s a lot of worry they could take Kyiv,” said Rice, now president of the Thayer Leadership consulting group in West Point, New York. “People are waking up to the reality that you need to give offensive weapons to end this war — at least to win it.”

The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russia’s fighting force.

Ukrainian soldiers will have to learn how to operate and sustain the latest batch of military aid, which includes Marder and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles from Germany and the United States, as well as Challenger 2, Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks from the U.K., Germany and the U.S., respectively. Also in the mix is a pledge from France to ship AMX-10 RC light, wheeled tanks.

“It’s a lot to do in a short period of time,” Rice said. “Just because they have just the right vehicles doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to take a major future offensive action. But … these Ukrainians have surprised the world every time.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, a former commander of the U.S. Army’s maneuver warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia, said Western upgrades offer Ukraine the chance to dominate the close fight with Russian adversaries and conclude the tactical fighting to its advantage.

Russian forces are already trying to slow down tanks in Ukraine with mines, trenches, and pyramidical, concrete “dragon’s teeth,” a type of fortification not seen in combat since World War II. Ukrainian forces, once equipped and trained for combined arms warfare and tank tactics, will be “designed to punch a hole through a defensive network,” Donahoe predicted.

But the sizable swaths of terrain Ukraine wants to liberate will take time, and to even build the necessary forces will take six months, Donahoe estimated.

The recent arms donations — Kyiv still wants fighter aircraft and long-range tactical missiles — are predicated on the assumption they’ll force Moscow to end its invasion and begin negotiations because military costs are too high. That objective has coexisted with an expectation that Putin’s government will probably never stop fighting, as losing the war could spell the end to his political power.

Pressure points

In the course of the past year, Putin’s domestic propaganda strategy has morphed from a message of “fight the Nazis” in Ukraine to “fight the West” there, said Stefan Meister, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War,” he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits.

And the near-total control of information by the government is making dissent difficult. “Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting,” Meister said.

Past attempts to squeeze the will for war out of Moscow economically also didn’t yield the immediate results for which experts hoped. Cracks may begin to appear this year, however.

“The consensus is that ordinary Russians will start feeling it this year,” said Charles Lichfield, an economics and sanctions analyst at the Washington-based Atlantic Council. “But Russians have a huge degree of tolerance for economic pain.”

Moscow has proved resourceful when it comes to building autonomy into critical goods, Lichfield explained. For example, the tactic of repurposing dishwasher electronics for weapons, mocked in the West as a sign of desperation, probably means “somebody thought about that from the beginning,” he said.

One area to watch is Russia’s payment of pensions. An inability to do so could foster economic discontent capable of turning public opinion against the war, Lichfield told Defense News.

“It would have to get pretty bad for the Russians to get there,” he said, adding that there’s no way of knowing how many reserves the government stashed away after years of fat checks from energy sales.

After imposing sanctions and export controls, Lichfield expects the West’s latest economic pressure point — oil price caps — to yield results because the Russian economy is so tightly linked to the energy market.

Which weapons will Washington send?

The United States, as Ukraine’s most important military supporter, remains the center of gravity when it comes to an eventual outcome for the conflict. American leadership has so far been largely united in their support for Kyiv.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expects the war to end at the negotiating table, but said serious diplomacy hasn’t begun because Putin is still clinging to “maximalist” goals.

“The ultimate end to this is the Ukrainians take back as much pre-Feb. 24 territory as they can get, force Putin to the bargaining table, and then ultimately Ukraine would have to compromise somewhat on issues like Crimea and portions of the east and arrange for solid security guarantees going forward,” Smith told Defense News in a phone interview.

“Right now, the Russians are talking about a major offensive in the next four months,” he added. “It seems like the Russians are at least thinking that they have some possibility of succeeding in that effort. I am skeptical.”

For its part, the Biden administration has started deliberations around the thorny question of whether helping Ukraine should entail retaking Crimea, which Russia seized and then annexed in 2014.

“That would be an extraordinarily risky thing to do,” Smith said. “But it’s important to have those conversations. And from what I understand, high levels of our government have talked about it.”

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former National Security Council director for European affairs in the Obama administration, said he “would not encourage Ukraine to seek to reassert control over Crimea by force, simply because the escalation risks are very high.”

“Crimea is of considerable strategic importance to Russia,” Kupchan told Defense News. “It looms large historically. It’s difficult for me to imagine that the Russians would accept complete defeat and expulsion from Crimea.”

But some on Capitol Hill are more bullish about lining up behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s goal of fully restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty over its territory.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., visited Ukraine in January and subsequently told Defense News at a news conference that “the American military has consistently underestimated the Ukrainian fighting ability.”

“Everything I have come to learn about the will and determination of the Ukrainians leads me to conclude retaking Crimea is within reach, and they need the artillery that will enable hitting targets — the sites of missiles destroying infrastructure in Ukraine,” he said.

Blumenthal has joined other lawmakers — particularly pro-Ukraine Republicans — in pushing President Joe Biden to give Zelenskyy most of the weapons he requested, including long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also called for sending long-range missiles to Ukraine alongside advanced Gray Eagle and Reaper drones.

“We should deliver these assets quickly to make an immediate difference on the battlefield,” Wicker said on the Senate floor in January. “In concert with our allies, this approach of ‘more, better, faster’ would give the Ukrainians a real shot at victory.”

While the Biden administration has voiced concerns that sending ATACMS to Ukraine could enable strikes into Russia, potentially escalating the war into a broader conflict with NATO, the Ukrainians could use those long-range missiles to strike Russian launch points on their own territory — including in Crimea.

Smith indicated he disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision not to send long-range missiles, noting every Ukrainian official assured him they would not use them to attack Russia.

But Smith also said ATACMS producer Lockheed Martin no longer makes the missiles, and the U.S. military still needs them in its stockpiles.

“We’re looking at a variety of different options there,” he said. “They’re not currently being made, so it is legitimately a question of readiness on our part and whether we’d have enough to spare. There are discussions about other longer-range munitions.”

The Biden administration earlier this month announced it is sending Ukraine the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb. The GLSDB has a range of up to 93 miles, doubling Ukraine’s strike range. However, that still falls short of the ATACMS, which would allow Ukraine to strike Russian targets about 190 miles away.

The Pentagon declined to say whether the GLSDB will be used to attack Russian targets in Crimea. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington told Defense News that Ukraine would not strike Russian territory with longer-range weapons pledged by the United States.

Future funding

Depending on how long the war lasts, it remains far from certain whether lawmakers will keep funding Ukraine aid packages. Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid.

The undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, told the Senate in January the Biden administration still expects the $45 billion Ukraine aid package Congress passed in December to last through the end of this fiscal year. But the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, warned at the hearing that the current funding level “does not preclude” the administration from needing to request more assistance before the end of September.

While the bipartisan majority of lawmakers support arming Kyiv, 57 Republicans voted against a $40 billion emergency aid supplemental in May. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., made several concessions to those Ukraine aid skeptics to secure the votes to win his protracted speakership battle.

He agreed to a House rules change that would allow any member to initiate a vote to remove him as speaker, forcing him to tread carefully even on issues that enjoy majority Republican support — such as Ukraine assistance.

It took 15 votes for McCarthy to secure the position, after which he appointed three Republicans who oppose Ukraine aid — Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas — to the Rules Committee, which controls legislation and debate on the House floor.

But another McCarthy concession — a procedure allowing 218 members to force a House floor vote on any bill — could present an opportunity for pro-Ukraine Republicans and Democrats to pass additional funding for Kyiv.

Still, the political dynamics may become more complicated in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, as some prominent Ukraine aid opponents, including former President Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have already thrown their hats into the ring or are reportedly considering doing so.

Making weapons

One key question that could determine the war’s end game is how long Ukraine’s backers can keep up their arms donations to Kyiv.

“There’s no such thing as infinite resources,” said Jensen, the CSIS analyst. “Heaven forbid this goes on another year, two years. At some point the fighting will exhaust even the entirety of the Western world’s support for Ukraine.”

While defense spending in the United States and Europe is trending upward, in large part because of Russia’s attack, industrial capacity to crank out weapons and ammunition has emerged as a bottleneck.

In response, companies on both sides of the Atlantic announced plans to restart production lines for artillery shells and other weapons considered somewhat arcane until recently.

Wicker said the fiscal 2023 government funding and defense authorization bills include money to expand munitions manufacturing, “doubling and even tripling production capabilities for weapons like 155mm shells, [anti-tank] Javelins and [the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System].”

Still, it’s an open question whether the U.S. will be able to indefinitely continue its current level of support, said Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser who has studied the volumes of artillery used in the war.

“They’re going through it at phenomenal rates,” he said of the Ukrainian military firing artillery munitions. “The U.S. bins are very low. We’re going to increase production substantially, but it’ll still be way below what the Ukrainians are using.”

The draft arrangement between the European Defence Agency and the Pentagon comes after years of both sides dancing around the subject of allowing the U.S. government and its vast defense-industrial complex into the growing circle of European Union defense projects.

The Brussels-based agency is a key player in facilitating such cooperation because its administrative arrangements with non-EU countries essentially impose the bloc’s regulatory regime for everything from export controls to intellectual property on any work product.

The draft, announced Monday, aims to “enable a substantial defense dialogue on all topics within EDA’s remit, and invitations for U.S. DoD to attend relevant meetings of EDA’s Steering Board and vice versa,” according to an EDA statement.

The document envisages as “specific activities” the areas of military mobility, supply chain problems and the impact of climate change on defense. The term “military mobility” describes efforts to streamline the transportation of defense equipment across European borders — a bureaucratic and technological hurdle.

Notably, the draft excludes any cooperative work that entails research and technology, noted Marie Jourdain, a Europe analyst at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

She told Defense News the new language reflects the fact that EU officials were always wary of American export-control rules of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations policy seeping into trans-Atlantic cooperative projects.

While questions over export controls are inconsequential when the work product is procedural in nature — like in the case of military mobility, where the DoD is already involved — any work aimed at developing new hardware would be subject to conflicting rules, she said.

“We’ll have to see what the new agreement means for PESCO,” said Jourdain, referring to the collection of 60 distinct EU defense projects that aim to resolve capability shortfalls across all military domains.

According to a fact sheet provided by the European Parliament, an administrative arrangement between EDA and a non-EU country is a “prerequisite” for PESCO participation.

With the new arrangement now excluding any cooperative activities aimed at capability development or involving research and technology, many projects will likely remain closed for U.S. participation, Jourdain said.

Similar language, she noted, was already in effect in the PESCO rules themselves, which fence off EU funding from non-bloc participants.

Signature of the letter of acceptance caps Berlin’s years-long quest to replace the portion of its aging Tornado fleet tasked with carrying out NATO’s doctrine of nuclear weapons sharing. German officials had decided on the Lockheed Martin-made jet in the spring, setting in motion the purchasing process for the aircraft, weapons and spares.

Lawmakers approved the funding in a session of the parliamentary Budget Committee earlier on Wednesday. It’s part of a $14 billion batch of procurements German defense leaders will use to improve lackluster military capabilities over the coming years, drawing from a special $107 billion defense fund set up after Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

“It is an honor to formally welcome Germany to the F-35 Lightning II Program,” said Bridget Lauderdale, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and general manager of the F-35 program. “Germany’s participation ensures the F-35′s European alliance continues to strengthen and grow through interoperability with NATO and ally nations.”

Training of German pilots with the first new planes is slated to begin in 2026 in the United States. Those activities are scheduled to move to Germany the following year, before the Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, declares an initial operational capability in 2028.

That timeline is of particular concern for the Germans because it requires facilities at the country’s F-35 base, Büchel in the west of Germany, to be ready for housing the modern planes by 2027.

Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Lt Gen. Ingo Gerhartz today told reporters in Berlin officials are in the process of tapping a general contractor with experience in building F-35-related infrastructure. The plan, he said, is to condense the permitting and construction process, which other officials have said can take six or seven years, to meet the envisioned 2027 target.

Military spokespeople in Berlin could not immediately say on Wednesday which contractor Gerhartz was referring to. In April, neighboring F-35 user Belgium, which plans to upgrade by 2025 the 1950s- and 1960s-era infrastructure at air bases Florennes and Kleine Brogel, awarded a Belgian-Dutch-U.S. consortium led by Jan De Nul a contract worth $692 million for the work.

Following Berlin’s purchase of the fifth-generation fighter jets, Lockheed Martin expects to reach out to local industry early in 2023 to include German subcontractors in the F-35 program, a company spokesman told Defense News.

Generally, there are limits to how much work can be awarded locally to international F-35 customers, as the jet contains secret technologies only the U.S. government and its contractors are allowed to service.

Editor’s note: This article was corrected to state that the F-35 is a fifth-generation aircraft.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary suggested European allies replenish the $771 million meant to shore up Europe’s defensive posture against Russia to fund President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border barrier.

The announcement is sure to jar European allies, where NATO members have nervously watched the president’s on-again, off-again commitment to the alliance. And it could deal a blow to the narrative among allies that Trump’s boisterous rhetoric should be taken with a grain of salt, given that money has kept flowing from Washington despite trans-Atlantic disagreements.

Half of the $3.6 billion for the border wall would come from dozens of U.S. military construction projects, and the other half would come from projects in Europe and the Pacific. In Europe, there were roughly 40 projects, including training facilities for special forces in Estonia and aviation infrastructure in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.

Trump is gambling that Congress and allies will eventually restore the money used for the wall, he originally said Mexico would pay for. Defense Secretary Mark Esper suggested that European nations should consider funding projects in their countries.

“The message that I’ve been carrying, since when I was acting secretary to today, has been about the increase in burden sharing,” Esper told reporters in London late on Thursday.

“So part of the message will be ‘Look, if you’re really concerned then maybe you should look to cover those projects for us’ because that’s going to build infrastructure in many cases in their countries,” he added.

As it stands, the maneuver will weaken NATO efforts to deter Russia, feed growing doubts that America would come to Europe’s defense and undermine extensive plans to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank, according to former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“If you looked at the state of the alliance, you could say the bad news was the president’s rhetoric was problematic for alliance unity, but the administration’s growing investment suggested on a sub-political level the alliance was getting stronger,” Daalder said Thursday. “I can no longer make that argument because we’ve just [signaled] we’re going to cut back on that investment.”

“There may be a good burden-sharing argument to be had, and that reinforcing NATO forces to the east is a shared obligation,” Daalder said, “but the way to do that is to sit down and decide what projects we’ll do, how we’ll do it together and who’ll pay for it―and we did, but now we’re reneging on that deal.”

On Thursday, Trump’s political opponents highlighted how the move follows his recent decisions to hold up $250 million in military aid to Ukraine and to abruptly cancel his trip to Poland to deal with Hurricane Dorian, sending Vice President Mike Pence in his place. Trump had been scheduled to attend an event last weekend remembering the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, which led France and Britain to declare war two days later.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he found it “galling and appalling” that Trump had secured multiple wins for an “American foe,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, in just two weeks.

“President Trump is, yet again, putting Vladimir Putin before the security of the American people and our allies,” Schumer said. “Cutting the funding used to reinforce our trusted European allies against Russian aggression in order to advance the president’s politically motivated vanity project — that he promised Mexico would pay for — is outrageous, wrong and weakens our national security. Congress will not stand for the president usurping our exclusive power of the purse.”

The targeted projects in Poland illustrate how the seemingly disparate list of smaller construction plans — a runway here, an ammo-storage bunker there — is actually part of a larger strategy, coordinated with NATO, to strengthen Europe’s defensive posture along the eastern front. Putting anything about a “rail extension and rail head” on the table — some line items named — could jeopardize ongoing plans for a cross-border transportation network capable of delivering heavy weaponry deep into Poland.

Such a staging area is envisioned by NATO officials near the country’s town of Powidz. Defense News previously reported that the site’s rail connectivity is vital to the alliance’s plan for a major ground-forces hub.

“Until the railhead is developed, it will be a limiting factor,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, told Defense News earlier this year as the Trump administration made a previous attempt to siphon funds away from Polish rail work.

Notably, the Pentagon’s list also curtails funding meant for storage facilities where the service could pre-position “deployable airbase systems,” or DABS. The Air Force had planned to build such warehouses — which would store vehicles, temporary housing and other equipment needed to whip up an expeditionary airfield — at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany; Sanem, Luxembourg; and Royal Air Force Fairford, England. All have been deferred.

During a July interview, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein pointed to “base-in-a-box” concepts like DABS as an example of how the Air Force could better disperse operations in Europe, as well as other regions such as the Asia-Pacific and Africa.

The delayed programs were largely chosen either because they were upgrades or replacements to existing facilities, a senior defense official told reporters in a Pentagon briefing Wednesday, or because their contract award dates are not scheduled for a year or more.

“We remain committed to supporting our allies and partners,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said. “The affected projects are still authorized and important but have been identified as having delays that would allow their deferment without immediate impact to our mission.”

One official from an allied nation whose project is listed said the U.S. State Department privately communicated that it would work to secure other unspecified funds to avoid construction delays, and that there was no request for it to replace any of the diverted funding. That official expressed frustration at the administration’s mixed messages.

Aaron Mehta of Defense News and Meghann Myers of Military Times contributed to this report.

His comments at the Munich Security Conference here come one day after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence used the same stage to urge Europe to walk away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The Trump administration last year reinstated sanctions against Iran that were suspended under the accord, thereby nixing the U.S. commitment to it.

Europeans, however, have attempted to keep the Obama-era deal alive, setting up a special trade mechanism last month designed to fulfill the pact’s requirement of normalized economic relations with Iran.

“The U.S. is now laboring to force others to violate that resolution,” Zarif said, adding that European efforts to save the JCPOA weren’t showing “much success.”

“Europe needs to be ready to get wet if it wants to swim against the tide of U.S. unilateralism,” Zarif said. He portrayed the latest transatlantic disagreement as part of an trend by Washington to subdue its European partners. Next up, he argued, could be a demand by the Trump administration to stop dealing with China.

Europeans have shared U.S. concerns about the failure of the Iran nuclear deal to limit Tehran’s missile arsenal. In addition, governments here believe that Iran is responsible for assassinations on European soil, a claim that Tehran has rejected.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel advocated for remaining in the JCPOA in a speech here on Saturday. “Are we helping our common cause, which is curbing the harmful or difficult influence of Iran, by canceling the only remaining agreement, or are we better off keeping the small anchor that we still have to perhaps build up pressure in other areas?”

“While the time for U.S. troops on the ground in northeast Syria winds down, the United States remains committed to our coalition’s cause, the permanent defeat of ISIS, both in the Middle East and beyond,” Shanahan said Friday at the 2019 Munich Security Conference.

Shanahan met with German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen and other foreign leaders on plans to defeat the Islamic State group.

Shanahan’s comments come as the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, Gen. Joseph Votel, told CNN that he would not have advised President Donald Trump to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. forces currently in Syria. Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in December.

“It would not have been my military advice at that particular time … I would not have made that suggestion, frankly,” Votel told CNN of the troop withdrawal. The caliphate “still has leaders, still has fighters, it still has facilitators, it still has resources, so our continued military pressure is necessary to continue to go after that network.”

The U.S. has been meeting with allies to discuss what type of additional forces they could provide to help monitor Syria after a U.S. withdrawal, particularly in northeast Syria, to keep Syrian Democratic Forces that have been key to the fight from being attacked by Turkey or pro-government forces after a withdrawal, Shanahan told reporters traveling with him this week.

Pentagon officials have warned the Islamic State has morphed into a global ideological network as it’s lost its grip on a physical caliphate. Shanahan said he was working with allies to develop ways to permanently defeat “ISIS’s influence across the globe.”

“I, for one, envision an even bigger and stronger coalition going forward – one that has evolved to meet the global threat posed by ISIS’s offshoots and its murderous ideology; a coalition that is utilizing the most effective collective capabilities to thwart ISIS’s malign influence and activities in places like Afghanistan, the Philippines, the Sahel, the Sulu Sea, and beyond,” he said.

Von der Leyen signaled she was in alignment with Shanahan’s assessment on the Islamic State as an evolved threat, saying that while the “physical caliphate,” is destroyed, “we are seeing the Islamic State change its face, go underground and build new networks.”

She also stressed the need for Iraq reconstruction, where Germany has had a role. The goal, she said, must be to support the Iraqi government in ensuring all groups in the country are adequately represented.

In Syria, she said, the multibillion-dollar reconstruction effort requires a political settlement first and for refugees to be resettled.

U.S. officials say the Islamic State is holding on to fewer than two square miles in Syria, or less than two square miles, in the villages of the Middle Euphrates River Valley, where the bulk of the fighters are concentrated.

On Capitol Hill in recent days, senior Defense Department officials have affirmed progress against ISIS but repeatedly warned that too rapid a withdrawal could create instability in the region. Votel said in congressional testimony that he was not consulted or warned Trump would declare a U.S. troop withdrawal and that the group still had “tens of thousands” of followers.

In the U.S., Trump’s withdrawal plans have attracted and alienated lawmakers from both parties, highlighted when the Senate, in a bipartisan vote Feb. 5, urged Trump not to precipitously withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan.