Trump Administration Cancels Missile Deployment in Germany and Announces Partial Troop Withdrawal

U.S. troops from German soil and effectively shelved a Biden-era plan to temporarily deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6 missiles in Germany, Defense News reported. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, speaking on Monday in Munster, Germany, after a major Bundeswehr combined-arms exercise, said the reported decision meant Germany would be left with a capability gap.

U.S. and German leaders. “That this may now not happen in the way we had assumed tears this capability gap open again.

” The Biden administration announced in July 2024 that it would temporarily station a Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany equipped with the Typhon ground-launched system, which can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6 interceptors. S. troops from Germany, with President Donald Trump suggesting the actual figure could be higher.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius sat on a GTK Boxer vehicle during a demonstration of capabilities by the German army on May 4, 2026, near Munster, Germany. At the government’s regular press conference on Monday in Berlin, Defense Ministry state secretary Kornelius Müller laid out Berlin’s three-pronged response to fielding a long-range missile capability.

The first thrust of Berlin’s response involves modernizing existing Taurus cruise missile stocks and accelerating development of the Taurus Neo successor.

The Taurus Neo successor program was approved by the Bundestag’s budget committee in late 2025. S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last July.

Müller declined to say whether Washington had responded to the Letter of Request. The third pillar is the European Long-Range Strike Approach, or ELSA, a joint program with the United Kingdom under which Berlin and London are co-developing strike capabilities beyond 2,000 kilometers range. France recently signaled its intention to join ELSA.

Müller declined to commit to any date when pressed on whether ELSA-derived capabilities would be ready before 2030. “I cannot say anything about a timeline,” Müller said, citing dependence on industrial availability and technology development. In Munster, Pistorius pointed to the ongoing European effort.

“We began in 2023, together with the British, and now the French want to join, to develop the precision-strike systems ourselves as Europeans − as fast as possible,” he said. S. help or via other paths − to close the capability gap in that bridging period as quickly as possible,” Pistorius added.

U.S. footprint on the continent as Washington pivots toward the Indo-Pacific.