Station U.S. Troops in Poland, Not Germany

Washington has pledged to help Kyiv “for as long as it takes,” but support from European allies has been uneven. The states along the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastern flank have stepped up to oppose Russia in the largest land war in Europe since World War II. But Germany and France have been more hesitant and less impressive. This underscores a new strategic reality to which the U.S. ought to respond by making hard decisions about where it positions its troops and resources in Europe. If Washington is serious about deterrence by denial, it needs permanent installations in the key frontier state: Poland.

As West Germany was the linchpin of NATO deterrence and defense during the Cold War, so is Poland today. Then, Bonn had the most powerful conventional European military and the largest American military footprint. Now, Warsaw is willing and ready to take risks to ensure that it can defend itself and meet its NATO obligations. Poland is in the process of building a 250,000-man regular army, plus a 50,000-strong Territorial Defense Force, with massive contracts to buy modern U.S. and South Korean tanks, F-35 aircraft, self-propelled howitzers and more. Other countries along the eastern frontier of NATO, especially Finland, the Baltic states and Romania, have also stepped up and are rearming at speed.

The same can’t be said of countries farther from the flank. Germany—which still hosts the majority of U.S. legacy military installations—recently failed again to meet its pledge to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense. France isn’t making a priority of investing in its land forces, while the U.K. recently announced that it will further reduce its army, making it the smallest force Britain has had since the Napoleonic era. The U.S. should prioritize working with what Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau recently called the “coalition of the delivering” within NATO, i.e., those countries actually willing to spend money to counter Russia.

It is high time for America to abandon the idea of rotational deployments, i.e., bringing troops periodically in-and-out of the European theater as an alternative to permanent stationing. Though framed as money saving, they’re costlier than permanent deployments. Rotational deployments also put unnecessary strain on the families of U.S. service members, waste time that could be spent on training and force integration with host nations, and, most important, send a message of lingering diffidence on Washington’s part when it comes to how it views the NATO members that joined the alliance after the Cold War.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine should have done away with the outdated assumption that these “new” members to the east are a lesser category of ally as Britain or Germany. It was clear then that Vladimir Putin’s ambitions made the later additions to the alliance pivotal members and has only become more obvious as the conflict has progressed. The massive logistical operation the U.S. has been running to supply Ukraine wouldn’t have been possible without the Jasionka transportation hub in southeastern Poland and Warsaw’s willingness to take on the attendant risk of Russian retaliation.

Regardless of how the war in Ukraine unfolds, for the U.S. to offer credible deterrence in Europe, it needs to put its permanent military installations where they are urgently needed. At a minimum, Washington should station three brigade combat teams on NATO’s eastern flank, with two going to Poland and one to Finland or one of the Baltic states. In addition, the U.S. needs to establish a permanent division headquarters in Poland. The legacy American facilities in Germany can refocus on providing support for training and reinforcement. Most important, rather than continuing to bemoan Berlin’s unwillingness to meet its 2% GDP defense pledge, Washington should induce Berlin to focus its efforts on sustaining U.S. and NATO forces out of eastern Germany, close to the Polish border.

The cost critique of permanent deployment makes particularly little sense in Poland, which already shoulders much of the cost of the roughly 10,000 U.S. troops there as part of a rotational presence. There’s little doubt that Warsaw would happily negotiate a cost-sharing arrangement. The region also has seen strategically significant infrastructure buildup. The Nordic countries, the Baltics, Poland and the Three Seas Initiative—composed of 12 European states along the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Sea—have made real progress on north-south roads that will be critical to military mobility along NATO’s eastern flank, with Via Baltica and Via Carpathia serving as the first critical nodes to connect the area between the Baltic and the Black Sea. Permanently stationing American forces in key Eastern European countries would accelerate these projects.

The war in Ukraine has made clear how dangerous our current round of great-power competition is and reinforced the basic principle of deterrence and defense: There’s no substitute for military power and a permanent forward presence. The critical point of contact for NATO going forward is Poland. If Washington wants to ensure that European deterrence holds, its deployments should reflect that.

Mr. Michta is director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States.