- The US announced deployments of new long-range fires weapons to Germany will start in 2026.
- The capabilities will include the SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons.
- The war in Ukraine has shown a need for more deep-strike options.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The planned deployment of new weapons systems to Germany follows the collapse of the INF Treaty and comes as NATO learns key lessons from the war in Ukraine, one being the value of ground-launched long-range strike options.
The US and Germany released a statement on Wednesday on the coming “episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future.”
The US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, which Washington accused Moscow of violating, allowed it to begin developing and fielding new ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow with the Oslo Nuclear Project, explained in a War on the Rocks commentary last year that “the ability to engage targets at operational and strategic depth critically enables the conduct of offensive and defensive maneuvers and can shape the conditions for victory on the battlefield.”
But, he said, “European states have long ignored the shift towards stand-off range and precision strike in modern war.”
New efforts are presently underway, though, and as Timothy Wright and Zuzanna Gwadera with the International Institute of Strategic Studies wrote recently, “NATO member states are reversing decades of surface-to-surface missile and rocket-inventory cuts by acquiring new capabilities.”
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