Signal No. 111 · Grading the promise

Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of war for policy, announced in a series of posts on X late on Monday that the Department had begun the Europe Posture Review. Hegseth opened that review at the NATO defence ministerial in Brussels on 18 June, telling allied ministers Washington would run a review of up to six months of its forces in Europe; it has been reported as running in the weeks since. The review is “designed to ensure that NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe taking primary responsibility for its conventional defense”, Colby wrote, and its outcome will be “an acceleration of NATO's transition to a stronger, more equitable, and sustainable alliance”. Per Stars and Stripes, it will take up to six months, will “provide a range of options that consider ‘geopolitical and military realities’”, and will be coordinated by General Alexus Grynkewich of US European Command with senior defence officials, with consultations to run through allies, Congress and other departments.

Hegseth set the marking scheme in Brussels on 18 June. The ministerial transcript has him promising “a review that some countries will fail and others will pass with flying colors”; speaking to reporters the same day, he put the tests as where basing sits, and where the United States can count on access and overflight when it needs them — the Iran campaign having been, in his account, the case that sorted allies. What the review will not have to settle is the force posture itself. Most of that moved on 1 May, when the Pentagon confirmed roughly 5,000 troops would leave Germany over six to twelve months; the same decision took with it a long-range fires deployment expected in Germany in 2026 and an armoured brigade rotation to Poland. The Army had discontinued its rotational brigade mission in Romania in October, on Stars and Stripes' account, which gives no year.

Both of those subtractions have since been worked on without the review. The cancelled Poland rotation was the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, more than 4,000 soldiers, and the 5,000 troops Trump announced for Poland on 21 May were read at the time as restoring it — which is why Radosław Sikorski described the effect as keeping American presence there “more or less at previous levels”. Whether those 5,000 rebuild that brigade, fold into another structure or add to the footprint was left open then and has not been settled since (Signal No. 66). Part of that capability is being bought back on German money, though not as a return: Berlin had lodged its own request for a Typhon launcher and up to 400 Tomahawks in Washington in July 2025, and Friedrich Merz told parliament this month the purchase goes ahead — one of the three weapon types the American unit was to have brought, paid for rather than stationed free, with Washington committed in a 7 July letter of intent to grant export approval in August. And on 1 July a NATO source told Reuters that European members had filled almost all the gaps opened by the crisis-pool drawdown — F-15s down by a third to 99, drones halved to 12, refuelling aircraft to 63 from 79, maritime patrol to 15 from 26, destroyers to nine from 17, the cruise-missile submarine and one of the two carriers withdrawn — with strategic bombers the one hole Europe could not close, and Washington offering one airframe there where it had committed two.

The CSU's Landesgruppe in the Bundestag — the Bavarian sister party's parliamentary bloc, not the party or the government — adopted a paper on Tuesday at its summer retreat at Kloster Banz asking that German support for Ukraine be repaid in technology. The text names three fields: cruise missiles, combat drones and counter-drone systems. “Germany must have a share in these armament innovations in order to strengthen its own defence and deterrence capability,” it reads, and it asks for “an intergovernmental agreement with Kyiv in which the Ukrainian side undertakes to share its technological capabilities with us”. Alexander Hoffmann, who leads the group, had put it more directly to Bild am Sonntag at the weekend: Germany needs an Unterstützungsdividende from Ukraine, a dividend on the support given.

The rest of the paper turns the same argument inward. It calls for a national military satellite fleet of more than 1,000 spacecraft, arguing Germany could strengthen NATO capabilities and become a technological pioneer in the military security of space, and for a national venture-capital initiative on the Israeli model in which the state carries part of the risk and private investors hold a right to buy out the public stake at a guaranteed price — the aim being to stop start-ups leaving the country (Zeit Online). No negotiation with Kyiv on such an instrument has been announced, and the federal government has not responded to the demand.

Kyiv already has a mechanism for this, and Germany is already inside it. Ukraine codified its arms-export framework at the end of April and signed drone-cooperation deals with Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that month; a Ukrainian-linked interceptor-drone joint venture has since been stood up in Germany, with output still ahead of it. Under the implementing procedure the Ukrainian government approved on 1 July, states concluding joint-production or technology-exchange agreements receive export permits from the State Service for Export Control within 30 days, and re-export or transfer to a third party is barred without Kyiv's written consent. The consent sits with the licensor and is granted case by case.

Volodymyr Zelensky spent just over an hour with Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, in a meeting closed to the press and held around the Washington memorial for Senator Lindsey Graham. His own account is the fullest one: the two “discussed licences for Patriot interceptor production and several other ideas”, and also spoke about diplomacy, with “our teams” to “arrange the details of their further communication”. No agreement, document or figure was released by either side, and the only American characterisation came from press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who called the meeting positive and productive.

The Financial Times reports, from people familiar with the discussions, that the US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner are in talks to travel to Kyiv; Zelensky has described the two as confirming an intention to go, with no dates set. Graham, who died on 11 July hours after returning from his tenth visit to Ukraine, is the other presence in the week. The Senate was due to begin voting on Tuesday evening on the bill he had championed — now the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, its tariff ceiling cut from 500 per cent to 100 per cent to gather votes — timed to Zelensky's visit to the Capitol, where all 100 senators had been invited to meet him. The measure would let the president impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the five largest importers of Russian crude or gas and the five states doing most to help Moscow evade energy sanctions. Reuters names India, Japan and some European Union member states among the consumers in scope.

A Department of Defense letter sent to lawmakers in May, described to Reuters by a source familiar with it and not previously reported, sets out the spending plan for USD 400 million Congress authorised for Ukraine. The funds are to be obligated during the financial year ending 30 September 2026; final delivery of all the assistance is estimated in the year ending 30 September 2029. Trump's second term ends on 20 January 2029. Two months after the letter, the source said, the money has neither been disbursed nor put on contract.

The plan covers capacity building: USD 200 million for weapons, ammunition and explosives, USD 99.9 million for vehicles, spares and equipment, and USD 100 million for services including transport of defence articles to Ukraine. Two sources told Reuters that members of Congress consider the timetable unusually slow for a war in progress. At a hearing last week with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, and Secretary Hegseth, Senator Dick Durbin asked the question in operational terms: “If you're talking about air defenses and the momentum alongside Zelenskyy, what impact will it have if we can't fund this for three years?”

Presenting record half-year results on Tuesday, Safran's chief executive Olivier Andriès put a date on the surviving piece of the collapsed Franco-German-Spanish fighter programme. EUMET — the venture with Munich's MTU Aero Engines, in which Spain's ITP Aero also holds workshare — is funded only until September, and its future depends on the paths each country takes. On our record EUMET's Phase 1B funding lapsed in April with nothing ordered since; what has carried it to September has not been described. Safran, Andriès said, cannot commit to two entirely different next-generation military engines and will give priority to French requirements. Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters the venture is set to close and its engineers to be redeployed absent new funding, unless Paris and Berlin settle on two broadly similar aircraft that could take the same engine — which most analysts consider unlikely.

The company itself is not the problem. First-half recurring operating profit rose 29 per cent to EUR 3.24 billion on revenue up 19 per cent to EUR 17.57 billion, an operating margin of 18.4 per cent. Safran raised full-year operating profit guidance to between EUR 6.4 billion and EUR 6.5 billion, and the shares were up 2.2 per cent in midday trading in Paris. Andriès reported ramping capacity in defence, particularly positioning and navigation, and said the company remains open to disciplined acquisitions there. Both Reuters and Handelsblatt note the contrast their sources draw: the engine partnership worked smoothly while the airframe partnership broke apart.