One of the United States’ top generals said that Europeans should be able to lead the continent’s defense in about a decade. U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, Commander of U.S. European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) in March 2026 that a handful of nations are near or have already met a NATO target for increased military spending.
At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, Alliance members approved spending up to 5% of their gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035. Gen. Grynkewich told the SASC that if NATO members stay the course on meeting that goal, they “won’t be all the way there [by 2030] but certainly by 2035 they will be.”
The NATO commitment on defense expenditures funds two categories. Members will spend at least 3.5% of GDP annually to core defense. Nations will allocate another 1.5% of GDP for security-related infrastructure, including network protection, civil preparedness and the defense industrial base. Every country in the 32-member Alliance achieved at least 2% in 2025, according to a BBC report that cited NATO figures. Only three countries — Poland, Lithuania and Latvia — spent more than 3.5% on defense in 2025, although Estonia and Norway came close, according to the BBC.
“Time is of the essence,” Gen. Grynkewich said at a July 2025 military symposium in Germany, “and I intend to keep highlighting that [commitment] and letting everyone know that we’ve got to move out, and we’ve got to move quickly.”
The U.S. government has pushed for its European Allies to spend more on their conventional defense so that it can free up U.S. resources for homeland defense and regions such as the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific.
Gen. Grynkewich used the U.S. force presence in Europe of more than 80,000 troops to highlight the allied support for Operation Epic Fury, the campaign against Iran by U.S. and Israeli militaries, according to a March 2026 report by the Stars and Stripes newspaper. “Our forces, bases and infrastructure take advantage of the (European) continent’s strategic geography and allow the United States to rapidly move forces, sustain operations and provide the president with diverse military options across multiple theaters,” Gen. Grynkewich said, according to Stars and Stripes.
Since becoming SACEUR in 2025, Gen. Grynkewich has emphasized that NATO’s strength lies in its unity. He told the SASC in his testimony that “military-to-military” relationships between the 32 members remains strong.
“With every chief of defense across the Alliance, we’ve maintained our focus on what it was that we were responsible for doing, which was defending every inch of Alliance territory from any form of aggression,” he said, according to Stars and Stripes.