COLOGNE, Germany — Germany is prepared to host advanced U.S. missiles meant to deter Russia under a Biden-era plan, but final confirmation of the move by the Trump administration is still outstanding.
At issue is the future of a July 2024 declaration by Germany and the United States, made on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington, that said Germany would facilitate “episodic deployments,” beginning in 2026, of long-range fires capabilities belonging to the U.S. Army’s Wiesbaden, Germany-based Multi-Domain Task Force.
Fourteen months on, with a new U.S. administration in charge, officials at the defense ministry in Berlin told Defense News they believe the plan is still on.
“The federal government has no indications that the U.S. side has reneged from the temporary stationing of long-range cruise missiles in Germany,” a spokesman wrote in an email last week.
It’s unclear, however, whether the machinations of a global posture review conducted by the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will reflect what U.S. defense officials had in mind when announcing the agreement with Berlin last year.
Specifically, the final location of the long-range fires unit attached to the Germany-based 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force is still up in the air.
The formation, the 3-12 Field Artillery Battalion, is currently based at Fort Drum, New York, and in the process of receiving the kinds of weaponry meant to boost NATO’s deterrence chops from the heart of Germany.
The U.S. Army plans to activate the unit on Oct. 16 a spokesperson for the service’s 56th Theater Multi Domain Command told Defense News. The plan is to grow the formation from 240 soldiers now to a final total of 540.
Once fully established, the battalion’s arsenal is envisioned to include HIMARS rocket artillery, the Typhon launcher — which can fire Tomahawk and SM-6 missiles — as well as hypersonic missiles.
“At this time, we do not have any further information regarding unit rotation,” the spokesperson said, using military-speak to describe the formation’s location on the globe.
Col. Jeffrey Pickler, who commands the 2nd MDTF near Wiesbaden, told Defense News last month, the HIMARS rocketry is closest to being delivered to the stateside long-range fires battalion.
As for the more advanced — and far-reaching weapons — like Typhon, he said soldiers will take more time to learn the system’s operation, looking for lessons from a sister unit devoted to the Pacific, which already has the capability.
The system can launch missiles with ranges of up to 2,000 kilometers, putting military installations in the Russian and Chinese hinterlands at risk that those countries would use to stage threats against Ukraine and Europe, as well as Taiwan, respectively.
Lockheed Martin, which makes the Typhon, is under contract to make four batteries for the Army, which each include four launchers with four cells each, for a total of 16 missiles loaded at once.
That’s where Berlin’s second avenue for getting a long-range missile system comes into play.
While Germany and other European nations ultimately want to develop their own weapon, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told his U.S. counterpart, Pete Hegseth, in July that Berlin wants Typhon as a gap-filler until then.
An initial request for information as part of the Pentagon’s so-called Foreign Military Sales process is now winding its way through the U.S. administration.
A German defense spokesperson declined to say where the request stands.
That purchase, if it materializes, would presumably entail Germany owning and operating the system alone, compared to the transatlantic host-operator relationship that would come with a U.S. Army Typhon-equipped unit located in the European country.
While German euros may be able to buy Typhons, there is little officials can do to influence potential changes to the Army’s footprint in Europe, which U.S. officials are expected to unveil this fall.
Christian Mölling, a program director and defense analyst at the Bertelsmann Foundation, said expectations here about the scope of the Pentagon exercise and its impact on longtime ally Germany vary wildly.
“It’s all rumors at this point,” he said, pointing to Hegseth’s tack on policing Pentagon information. “You hear anything from significant change to marginal adjustments, given that abandoning valuable U.S. military infrastructure here would make little sense.”
Jen Judson in Washington contributed to this report.
Sebastian Sprenger is associate editor for Europe at Defense News, reporting on the state of the defense market in the region, and on U.S.-Europe cooperation and multi-national investments in defense and global security. Previously he served as managing editor for Defense News. He is based in Cologne, Germany.
