U.S. to Deploy Intermediate-Range Missiles in Germany

September 2024
By Xiaodon Liang

The United States will deploy conventionally armed ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Germany on a rotational basis beginning in 2026, the two countries announced July 10 on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington.

U.S. Army forces in Germany will field the multipurpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, and a hypersonic missile that is still in development in “episodic deployments…as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future,” the joint announcement said. These weapons will equip the army’s Multi-Domain Task Force based at Wiesbaden, Germany, which the army first activated in September 2021.

Russia will adopt “mirror measures” in response to the German-U.S. announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin said July 28, the Associated Press reported. If the deployments go forward, Russians will consider themselves “free” from a unilateral moratorium on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, he said. Prior to the German-U.S. announcement, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov confirmed in a June 27 interview with Izvestia that Moscow also is revising its nuclear declaratory policy.

The Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile has a reported range of more than 1,600 kilometers, while the hypersonic missile, known as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), will have a range of at least 3,000 kilometers. Both previously would have been prohibited under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which barred the production and deployment of ground-launched missiles having a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. The Trump administration withdrew the United States from that treaty in August 2019, and Russia reciprocated by suspending its participation.

After the U.S. withdrawal, Russia proposed a joint moratorium on the deployment of missiles with these ranges and indicated it would be willing to halt deployment of the 9M729 cruise missile, which had been the focus of U.S. allegations about treaty violations. In talks prior to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia proposed agreements with NATO and the United States that would bar deployments inside and outside national territories that allowed this category of missiles to reach the territories of other parties to the agreements. (See ACT, January/February 2022.)

The U.S. Army first introduced the idea of a multidomain task force in a March 2021 concept paper. Under those plans, each task force would contain a Strategic Fires Battalion with three sets of capabilities: a short-range ballistic missile battery, a midrange capability battery, and a long-range hypersonic battery. The United States deployed a midrange battery, fielding the SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles, to a foreign country for the first time earlier this year when a unit participated in exercises in the Philippines. (See ACT, May 2024.)

The Army completed the first successful end-to-end flight test of the LRHW system in May after a series of cancellations and setbacks in 2023. (See ACT, November 2023.) The Government Accountability Office said in a July report that officials believe it will take the Army roughly 11 months to field an LRHW battery after an initial successful test.

The LRHW and Tomahawk weapons systems are not the only intermediate-range missiles that will soon equip NATO forces in Europe. France, Germany, Italy, and Poland signed a letter of intent July 11 at the NATO summit on development of a new ground-launched cruise missile with a range of more than 500 kilometers, Reuters reported. French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu said other countries are welcome to join the acquisition initiative.

The German-U.S. announcement did not include a new public arms control proposal to Russia, but on July 25, Mallory Stewart, U.S. assistant secretary for arms control, deterrence, and stability, said that the United States has been “explaining to [the Russians] why having some type of limitation on arms racing in this particular context is in their interest as well as ours.”

The reaction in Germany exposed rifts in the governing coalition. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Green party welcomed the forthcoming deployment in a July 21 interview with the Funke Media Group, noting that Putin had “broken with disarmament treaties and our common European peace architecture” years ago. Her comments came in response to the parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Rolf Mützenich, who expressed concerns about the destabilizing effects of short missile flight times to the same news group.

But the SPD party presidium on Aug. 12 backed Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius in endorsing the deployment decision, according to the German news agency dpa. The endorsement resolution emphasized that “nuclear armament of the systems is not envisaged,” dpa reported.

Separate surveys conducted by the opinion research firms Forsa and Civey indicate deep divisions in German society on the deployment.

On July 19, Vipin Narang, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told a Washington think tank that NATO has made less prominent adjustments to its nuclear forces that were not highlighted at the NATO summit. These include an ongoing “raising and refreshing [of] the nuclear IQ” with a focus on developing expertise in nuclear planning.

Narang said the alliance is integrating the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb and the F-35 combat aircraft as the new combination of systems for delivery of forward-deployed U.S. nuclear weapons. He added there are no plans to change where nuclear weapons are stored in Europe.