The “Wall Street Journal” yesterday wrote that US president Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to pull up to 9.5 thousand American soldiers out of Germany before September. The report was followed by Reuters informing that part of the 9.5 thousand Americans are to be transferred to Poland, with the figure of 5000 being mentioned as the most probable.
The US military currently has over 35 thousand soldiers and 17 thousand civilian employees stationed in Germany. Apart from that, they have a strategic infrastructure on site: a military hospital in Landstuhl, an airbase in Ramstein and a command centre for operations in Europe and Africa located near Stuttgart. It is in Germany where the Americans also have the largest amount of American military equipment in Europe.
In August 2019, the US ambassador in Germany warned Berlin that his country will soon pull back some of the soldiers from near the Rhine river and transfer them to Poland. It is a consequence of Germany’s too low – according to Washington – expenditure on defence. Georgette Mosbacher, the American ambassador in Poland, back then wrote on Twitter:
“On the contrary to Germany, Poland fulfils its obligations to spend 2% GDP on NATO. We would gladly transfer American soldiers from Germany to Poland”.
During president Andrzej Duda’s visit in Washington, US president Donald Trump also spoke of moving part of the American troops from Rhine to Poland.