Ordering the Selected Reserve and Certain Members of the Individual Ready Reserve of the Armed Forces to Active Duty | The White...
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including sections 121 and 12304 of title 10, United States Code, I hereby determine that it is necessary to augment the active Armed Forces of the...
I think this is a nothingburger. First of all it is only 3000 troops. We must have 50-100k troops in europe already, so this is a drop in the bucket.
And we can glean that it is not a high priority deployment, whatever it is because they are only sending reservists. No units were sent from our domestic garrisons or redirected from any existing task to do this, they stood up guys who play soldier on weekends, and guys already living civilian life after finishing active duty (but still technically in the reserves).
The US stations troops in allied nations for 2 reasons. Ostensibly the main reason is to aid in a fight, strike at our mutual enemies and whatnot, but the cynical other reason is that potential hostilities could hit American troops. That means if you are planning to bomb germany, or poland, or japan, or the phillipines, Americans are gonna die and that means our country will be PISSED.
It's human collateral showing we have literal skin in the game when it comes to defending our allies.
So since Sweden and Finland just joined NATO, my guess is we are standing up new units to garrison a base or two in the new member countries. They're using reservists because recruitment is down.