The benefits of US troops here include deterring adversaries, combat training with allies on European terrain, and absorbing lessons from nearby Ukraine, they told Reuters and a small group of other media visiting the US Army’s only combat training centre outside the US, located in Hohenfels, southern Germany.

The ​handful of officers who spoke either did not comment on President Trump’s remarks or declined to.

Spokespeople for the US Army ​in Europe and Africa and European Command did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on how a ⁠troop reduction would impact activities in the country.

Germany is the US military’s largest footprint in Europe, with some 35,000 active-duty military personnel, ​and serves as a key training hub.

That includes the Hohenfels facility, which spans some 163 square kilometres of forest and hosts large-scale combat training for ​US troops as well as other NATO and partner nations.

On Thursday, a US armoured unit was a week into a gruelling 10-day-long exercise, which included evading an opposing force and its arsenal of surveillance and attack drones.

The brigade is at the end of a nine-month deployment in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern ​Europe as part of a US Army-led initiative to support NATO while building readiness and enhancing bonds between ally and partner militaries.

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 the brigade’s commander, Colonel Michael Ziegelhofer.

“The fact that we’re out here represents, you know, really our country’s support for NATO and our allies.”

‘Fight together’

Training with other nations is “incredibly important,” said Ziegelhofer, standing on the edge of a small mock town. “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.”

The brigade has also been learning about drones during their deployment in Europe, added Ziegelhofer. “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.”

Lessons from Ukraine

The evolution of drones and electronic warfare is among the lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war being incorporated into training, said Lieutenant Colonel Michael Cryer, commander of the opposition forces permanently assigned to Hohenfels training area, ⁠known as ​the “warrior” battalion.

“It’s been a cat-and-mouse game, as you’ve seen in Ukraine,” he said. “Where one ​side develops this capability, another side develops a countermeasure.”

One of the biggest challenges, according to the officer, is maintaining options for offensive manoeuvres while being constantly surveilled by ​aerial drones.

“It is nearly impossible to hide,” Cryer said. “Across the army, we haven’t totally come to grips with that.”