The US military will keep three heavy army brigades in Europe on a continuous basis, reversing Barack Obama’s reduction of forces after concluding that Russian aggression poses an enduring threat to continental stability.

The shift in course is the latest in a series of small restorations of the military status quo before Obama, suggesting that senior officers have already begun to look past his presidency.

Shortly after Obama leaves office in 2017, the army presence in Europe will return to three armored brigades, with associated vehicles and artillery set for immediate restoration.

In 2012, the Obama administration removed two of the four army brigades long stationed in Europe, though after Vladimir Putin’s 2014 invasion and occupation of eastern and southern Ukraine, the military began bolstering its presence, particularly in eastern Europe.

General Phil Breedlove, the outgoing Nato military chief, announced the additional force presence as a critical step in reassuring European allies of a US military commitment that some have called into question.

“This army implementation plan continues to demonstrate our strong and balanced approach to reassuring our Nato allies and partners in the wake of an aggressive Russia in eastern Europe and elsewhere. This means our allies and partners will see more capability – they will see a more frequent presence of an armored brigade with more modernized equipment in their countries,” Breedlove said on Wednesday.

The announcement comes a day after the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Joseph Dunford of the marine corps, cited Russia as one of his principal persistent security challenges and took note of bolstered Russian conventional and digital military capabilities that have recently matured.

Russia’s “new intercontinental ballistic missiles, aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, tanks, and air defense systems”, backing Vladimir Putin’s willingness to seize territory from his neighbors and launch the first out-of-area Russian military expedition in a generation, in Syria, has rendered the Russian military “the greatest array of threats to US interests”, Dunford told a Washington thinktank.

The rearmament in Europe reverses a longstanding push in US defense circles to de-emphasize a continent once believed to be thoroughly stable. It also comes amid two political developments: the rise of Donald Trump, who has disparaged the Nato alliance as a drain on US resources, and the twilight of Obama, whose discomfort with ground troop deployments appears to pose less of a restriction to commanders.

Last week, Dunford and the defense secretary, Ashton Carter, openly predicted an imminent increase of US ground forces in Iraq and Syria – officially at 3,870 but functionally around 5,000 – before submitting their recommendations for a troop escalation to the White House.

The new commander of the Afghanistan war, General John Nicholson, has also voiced discomfort with the already-delayed troop drawdown Obama has ordered by the end of his presidency. Nicholson will soon issue a troop request to Obama, which Dunford signaled on Tuesday will reflect “fundamental changes” that the military considers necessary to avoid a repeat of Afghanistan’s bloody 2015.