The Army is quietly considering a sweeping reduction of up to 90,000 active-duty troops, a move that underscores mounting fiscal pressures at the Pentagon and a broader shift in military strategy away from Europe and counterterrorism, according to three defense officials familiar with the deliberations.
Internal discussions are exploring trimming the force to between 360,000 and 420,000 troops -- down from its current level of roughly 450,000. The potential cuts would mark one of the most dramatic force reductions in years, as military planners aim to reshape the Army from a blunt conventional force into what they hope could be a more agile, specialized instrument better suited for future conflicts. It's unclear whether any cuts are being mulled for the Army Reserve or National Guard.
The move comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to come up with plans to cut 8% from the budget. Hegseth has long criticized what he describes as "woke" initiatives within the military, though that critique has centered on ill-defined cultural grievances and confused the force on how to comply and on what exactly needs scrubbing.
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Efforts to combat climate change -- acknowledged by military leaders for years as a pressing national security issue -- have also come under scrutiny in Hegseth's Pentagon. Eliminating such programs alone would not yield anywhere close to 8% savings, making reductions in combat forces likely unavoidable.
The discussion of cuts comes as the Army is spread especially thin across the world, juggling counterterrorism missions in Africa and the Middle East, which are basically legacy missions from the Global War on Terrorism era, while building its footprint in the Pacific to counter Beijing's expansionist goals.
Moreover, the Army has effectively been the quarterback in bolstering NATO's front lines amid Russian President Vladimir Putin's ongoing war on Ukraine, a mission that the Trump administration has frequently scoffed at.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels, delivered a blunt message: President Donald Trump expects European nations to increase their military spending significantly.
"He's against a NATO that lacks the capabilities needed to fulfill its obligations under the treaty," Rubio said. "This is a hard truth, but one that must be addressed."
The Army has not detailed how or where potential cuts would be made, and the service declined to comment. One defense official cautioned that such internal reviews frequently consider a range of scenarios -- including extreme ones -- and that no final decisions have been made. Each of the three officials was granted anonymity to avoid retaliation because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Still, some officials have voiced concerns that a dramatic reduction in force levels could exacerbate an already difficult recruiting environment and drive skilled personnel away.
"If we reduce the force without a clear retention strategy, we risk losing talented people who have other options," another official said.
The idea of shrinking the Army may already be percolating within the Pentagon. Austin Dahmer, a former national security adviser to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is now a senior Defense Department policy staffer, who could play a key role in force structure.
In 2023, he penned a white paper for the Marathon Initiative, a Republican-centric national security think tank, that makes the case for dramatically scaling back the Army's size in favor of reallocating money spent on the land force to the Air Force and the Navy -- arguing that in a war with China, many of the Army's capabilities, such as the Paladin tracked artillery vehicle, would be obsolete in island-hopping campaigns.
However, the dramatic reductions would be difficult without cutting into the Army's light infantry brigades, which would likely be critical in seizing terrain in massive cities.
"One of the largest bill payers in resourcing the strategy of denial should be the Army. This is because the size of the Army's large-scale land maneuver forces is principally scaled to the threat of Russian invasion of NATO territory," Dahmer wrote in the white paper. "Large-scale land maneuver forces are of much less utility in the vast maritime and littoral theater of the Western Pacific."
One defense official noted that Dahmer has had no role in the Army war-gaming reducing the force.
On Thursday, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee criticized Pentagon "midlevel" staffers for what he described as a misguided plan to reduce the number of troops in Europe, though it's unclear what staffers he was referring to.
"There are some who believe now is the time to drastically reduce our military footprint in Europe," Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said at a hearing with U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command military leadership. "I'm troubled at those deeply misguided and dangerous views held by some midlevel bureaucrats within the Defense Department.
"They've been working to pursue a U.S. retreat from Europe, and they've often been doing so without coordinating with the secretary of defense," Wicker said.
If the Army reduced the size of its active-duty force by the estimates under consideration, it could be far more dramatic than the announced plan to reduce the size of the force by about 24,000 last year. Then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters the service was cutting positions associated with counterterrorism.
The Army at the time announced a cut of about 10,000 positions for engineers and similar jobs that were tied to counterinsurgency missions. Additional cuts came from cavalry squadrons, whose relevance has dwindled with the advancement of drone technology. Support roles in special operations were also scaled back.
At the time, Wormuth noted the service wasn't cutting soldiers themselves out of the Army, but that the lion's share of those cuts were job positions, many of which weren't even filled.
The move also comes as the service is seemingly digging itself out of a yearslong recruiting slump, which has been attributed to a lack of qualified candidates.
The Army was uniquely affected, being by far the largest service and thus having the most ambitious enlistment quotas. Still, the Army met its recruiting goals last year and is on track to see a healthy haul of enlistments this year, largely due to pre-basic training courses for applicants who did not initially meet academic or body weight standards.
-- Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.
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