HOHENFELS, Germany, April 30 - At the U.S. Army's combat training center in Hohenfels on Thursday, several senior officers outlined why a continued American presence in Germany remains strategically and operationally important, amid a White House review of whether to reduce U.S. troop levels in the country.
Officers who spoke with visiting journalists highlighted three primary benefits of the U.S. footprint here: deterring potential adversaries, conducting realistic combat training with allied forces on European terrain, and integrating battlefield lessons observed from the nearby conflict in Ukraine. Those benefits, they said, are evident in the kinds of large-scale exercises that Hohenfels hosts.
Germany is home to the U.S. military's largest European presence, with some 35,000 active-duty personnel, and serves as a central training hub. The Hohenfels facility itself covers roughly 163-square kilometers of forest and terrain and is the U.S. Army's only combat training center located outside the United States. It stages multinational training events for U.S. forces alongside NATO and partner militaries.
On Thursday the unit on site was conducting a demanding 10-day exercise, now a week underway, that tested armored maneuver, evasion of an opposing force and coping with an array of surveillance and attack drones. The brigade engaged at Hohenfels has been concluding a nine-month deployment in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe as part of a U.S. Army-led effort to support NATO while sharpening readiness and strengthening ties between allied and partner forces.
"Their presence in Europe shows potential adversaries that in the event of a conflict that they're going to face the most ready, trained, lethal fighting force, and not just the United States, but the United States and its NATO allies," said Colonel Michael Ziegelhofer, the brigade commander. "The fact that we're out here represents, you know, really our country's support for NATO and our allies."
Standing on the edge of a small, constructed mock town used for urban training, Ziegelhofer emphasized the importance of working with other nations. "If a crisis were to take place over here, we'd be in the fight together, so training like this helps us to build the interoperability, not just with the equipment that we have, but between the people and the systems and the processes in our unit," he said.
He added that the brigade's deployment across Europe has included extensive exposure to drones. "We worked all the way from learning how to fly them to getting pretty sophisticated in understanding the systems and processes, both in using them ourselves and how to counter the enemy's use of those since we've been over here," Ziegelhofer said.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Cryer, the commander of the opposition force permanently assigned to the Hohenfels training area - known within the facility as the "warrior" battalion - said the Russia-Ukraine war has influenced training emphases. He pointed to the rapid evolution of drones and electronic warfare in that conflict and how adversaries and defenders continually adapt.
"It's been a cat-and-mouse game, as you've seen in Ukraine," Cryer said. "Where one side develops this capability, another side develops a countermeasure."
Cryer also described a persistent operational challenge: remaining able to execute offensive options while being subject to near-constant aerial surveillance by drones. "It is nearly impossible to hide," he said. "Across the army, we haven't totally come to grips with that."
Requests for comment about how a potential reduction in troop numbers would affect operations in Germany went unanswered by U.S. Army in Europe and Africa and by the European Command at the time of the visit.
The officers' remarks framed the training center's activities as both a demonstration of alliance cohesion and a practical venue for adapting tactics and procedures to contemporary threats. The exercises at Hohenfels combine maneuvers involving armored units, opposing forces roles, and training on the integration and countering of unmanned systems - all elements commanders say are essential to maintaining readiness and deterrence in Europe.
As the review of U.S. force posture continues at the national level, the officers at Hohenfels and the units rotating through the facility are focused on preparing for complex, multi-domain operations alongside NATO partners, while working through the operational challenges posed by new technologies and battlefield dynamics.