Defense News Force Deployment - Reinsurance Combat drones

Poland ready to pay majority of costs to receive US forces on its soil

August 4, 2020

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President Trump's decision to withdraw 12.000 of the 37.000 troops permanently deployed in Germany in order to put pressure on Berlin for its lack of investment in NATO, continues to be controversial in the United States, where the measure is at least unpopular, particularly within the Pentagon. It must be said that the costs of this redeployment, half of the workforce returning to the United States and the other half being redeployed to Belgium and Italy, are likely to fall.cut the American Defense budget well beyond what the construction of the anti-immigration wall on the border with Mexico did. According to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the construction of the infrastructure necessary to accommodate the redeployed forces will amount to billions of dollars, the figure of 10 billion dollars being the most often cited. That is, roughly the price of a Ford-class aircraft carrier, a hundred F35A, or 300 light reconnaissance and attack helicopters, all critical programs for the American armies.

But for some countries, this redeployment constitutes an opportunity that should not be missed under any circumstances. This is the case of Poland which, since the election of President Duda in 2015, has undertaken to get as close as possible to Washington, often at the expense of its European partners. Already in 2018, Warsaw proposed to President Trump toincrease the American military personnel present in Poland, by establishing a base ostensibly named "Fort Trump". Since President Trump's announcement of the withdrawal of American forces from Germany, the Polish authorities have therefore redoubled their efforts to encourage the Pentagon to redeploy some of these forces east of the Oder, hesitating not to put his hand in the wallet by offering to take the majority of redeployment costs to be borne by him.