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Vice President JD Vance has defended the Pentagon’s decision to pause a planned US troop deployment to Poland, a move that comes as the department scales back its US Army presence in Europe.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, President Trump has spent his second term aggressively pushing European countries to take over more responsibility for their own collective defense and rely less on the United States, and has been growing increasingly frustrated with what he views as a lack of NATO support for the US-Israeli war against Iran. Under the Biden administration, the US poured thousands of extra troops into Eastern Europe after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Trump has since been steadily drawing those forces down, having yanked US troops out of Romania last year and said earlier this month that the Pentagon is set to cut 5,000 personnel from Germany (a move widely seen as punitive after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticized the Iran war and said the US had been “humiliated” in its negotiations with Tehran). On any given day, there are roughly 10,000 US troops in Poland, and the bulk of them aren’t permanent; they cycle in and out on rotations that run a few months at a time.

What’s going on now: While speaking to reporters at a White House briefing Tuesday, Vance downplayed the pause as a routine logistical matter and accused the European press of blowing it out of proportion. “We’ve not reduced the troop levels in Poland by 4,000 troops. What we did is that we delayed a troop deployment that was going to go to Poland. That’s not a reduction, that’s just a standard delay and rotation that sometimes happens in these situations. I think frankly a lot of the European media is overreacting to this a bit.”

The pause specifically affects a planned nine-month rotation of the Texas-based 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division (part of which had already arrived in Poland last week before the deployment was abruptly halted, prompting a scramble to return hundreds of personnel and stop further departures from Fort Hood).

The decision drew sharp bipartisan criticism from members of Congress, who said they had not been consulted and that the move sends the wrong message to Russia. House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) told Army leaders at a hearing last week that the panel was “not happy” and that “there’s been no statutory consultation with us,” while neither Army Secretary Dan Driscoll nor acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve could explain why the rotation had been paused after some elements were already in transit. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said Polish officials had been completely blindsided.

The pause is part of the Pentagon’s broader Tuesday announcement that it is cutting the number of US Army Brigade Combat Teams in Europe from four to three (a single BCT typically consists of roughly 4,400 to 4,700 soldiers), a move that brings US troop levels on the continent back down to where they were in 2021. Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell framed the reduction as the result of a “comprehensive, multilayered process focused on U.S. force posture in Europe” and tied it directly to Trump’s broader agenda.

The Pentagon repeatedly described Poland as “a model U.S. ally” and said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got on the phone with Polish Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz earlier Tuesday to promise him the US isn’t pulling out and would keep a “strong military presence in Poland” even with fewer boots on the ground.