The United States has announced plans to arm its European allies with new long-range weapons by 2026.
Planned The deployment of the new weapons systems to Germany follows the collapse of the INF Treaty and comes as NATO is learning important lessons from the Ukraine war, one of which is the value of long-range ground-launched strike options.
The United States and Germany issued a statement on Wednesday saying they would “intermittently deploy Multi-Domain Task Force long-range fires capabilities to Germany in 2026 as part of plans to permanently station these capabilities in the future.”
“These conventional long-range fires forces will include SM-6, Tomahawk and hypersonic weapons in development, which have significantly longer ranges than Europe's current land-based fires,” the allies wrote.
The United States recently deployed Medium-Range Reconnaissance (MRC) launchers to the Philippines. U.S. Army photo by Capt. Ryan DeBooi
The United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, which it accused Moscow of violating, allowing it to begin developing and deploying new ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.
Since then, the U.S. has fast-tracked development of systems such as hypersonic missiles like the Typhon, which uses ground-based launchers to fire Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) and Tomahawk missiles, and the Army's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, which is under development but has run into delays and funding problems.
The Typhon system was recently deployed overseas during U.S. military exercises in the Philippines.
Ukrainian troops watch as an M142 HIMARS rocket is fired in the Bakhmut area of Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
The Ukraine war has highlighted the value of being able to effectively launch long-range standoff attacks.
Russia has used long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, often in combination with one-way attack drones, to target Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, and in Ukraine's case, Western-provided Advanced Landing Combatant Combat (ATC) missile systems and Storm Shadow cruise missiles have given it the capability to strike targets in Russian-occupied territories, such as Crimea.
“The ability to engage targets at operational and strategic depth can decisively enable the conduct of offensive and defensive operations, setting the conditions for victory on the battlefield,” Fabian Hoffman, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project, explained in an editorial in War on the Rocks magazine last year.
But, he said, “Europeans have long ignored the shift in modern warfare toward standoff distances and precision strikes.”
But a new effort is underway, and as Timothy Wright and Zuzanna Gwadera of the International Institute for Strategic Studies recently wrote, “NATO allies are reversing decades of drawdowns in their stockpiles of surface-to-surface missiles and rockets by acquiring new capabilities.”
