The National Interest - ‘NATO 3.0’ Needs More Manpower - July 2, 2026 - By: Alex Wagner, and Kristen Taylor

 The National Interest 

‘NATO 3.0’ Needs More Manpower

July 2, 2026

By: Alex Wagner, and Kristen Taylor

The alliance’s higher spending pledges should include commitments to increase personnel spending. 

The upcoming NATO Summit in Ankara should be an opportunity to demonstrate real progress within the alliance. This was the underlying message of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s visit to Washington last week: lock in European momentum on defense spending before US ambivalence can unsettle it. Defense spending and defense industrial cooperation will take center stage in Ankara next week.

What deserves equal attention—and is less likely to get it—is whether NATO can generate the manpower required to give that spending real military credibility. The Trump administration is asking Europe to do more–and steps to increase manpower would have a two-fold effect: enhance European deterrence and signal to the United States that Europe is serious about stepping up national commitments to augment its own security.

Earlier this year, the United States gave European allies whiplash–announcing a drawdown of troops from Germany and Poland, then promising a new deployment of soldiers to Poland. This follows last year’s decision to end a rotational brigade of forces in Romania. Now that the dust has settled, the United States is preparing to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany and has promised a wholesale restructuring of American force posture on the continent.

While it is important to note that the Trump administration cannot drop the number of forces stationed in Europe below 76,000 without triggering formal consultations with Congress, the Trump administration’s recent announcements have left the alliance with significant uncertainty regarding manpower, at a time when this uncertainty weakens deterrence in the European theater and undermines alliance cohesion.

Rutte’s Washington visit also highlighted Europe’s progress toward the 5 percent of GDP defense spending commitment from The Hague, praised the Trump administration’s pressure for accelerating European seriousness, and framed the moment as the beginning of “a real transatlantic defense industrial revolution.”

Along those lines, he previewed that Ankara would produce a “NATO 3.0” bolstered by “tens of billions of dollars of new [defense] contracts,” and big numbers packed into a final communique are a near certainty. But no matter how much European members commit to new platforms, munitions, or technology upgrades, the harder problem may go largely unaddressed: manpower.

As we noted last year in The National Interest, Europe’s manpower challenges are significant: low propensity to serve, inadequate pay, cultural resistance to military service across several allies. But structurally, perhaps the biggest constraint is demographic. Europe has spent two decades producing smaller military-age cohorts than the generations before them—and that’s the pool NATO is recruiting from now. The EU’s birthrate fell below 4 million in 2022 for the first time since 1960, suggesting any reversal is unlikely.

But there are concrete steps that European allies can take to bolster their militaries. Increased defense spending must include substantially higher personnel costs—targeted pay raises for existing service members and meaningful investment in modernizing the recruiting infrastructure. NATO allies currently spend an average of just under 35 percent of their defense budgets on personnel—ranging from service pay to pensions. That share will need to grow, not just in absolute terms as budgets increase, but as a deliberate priority. Closing the gap left by a reduced US presence requires more Europeans willing to serve and trained to operate the equipment their governments are buying.

NATO allies gathering in Ankara can commit to historic levels of defense investment and mean every dollar of it. But a reduced US presence will require substantially larger European manpower to secure NATO’s eastern flank, particularly in the Baltics.

Without it, additional funding won’t translate into the sort of credible deterrence posture necessary to deter Russia. To bolster manpower and adopt new platforms and technologies, allies could strengthen deterrence, create new jobs in the military sector for citizens, and provide another data point to a skeptical US administration that Europe continues to take greater control over matters related to its own collective defense.

About the Authors: Alex Wagner and Kristen Taylor

Alex Wagner was the assistant secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs during the Biden administration. He is currently a distinguished fellow with the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative and the GeoStrategy Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and an adjunct professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.

Kristen Taylor is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, where she oversees portfolios related to transatlantic defense, industrial, and innovation work. Previously, she held internships with the Center for a New American Security, the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, and the US Department of State. She also conducted research for the Czech government on Ukrainian refugee resettlement through the Masaryk Diplomatic Program.

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