Poland’s Military Build-Up Might Have Ultimately Been for Nothing

The Washington Post published an insightful piece in late January about how “Poland built the E.U.’s biggest army, but the threat has changed”, which persuasively argues that the central role of drones in the Ukrainian Conflict has prompted questions about Poland’s military build-up over the past decade. It now has the largest armed forces in the EU with over 215,000 personnel, thus making it thethird-largestin all of NATO, and it also boasts the bloc’s highest military spending at 4.7% of GDP.

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It’s now dawning on Polish policymakers that their country’s costly military build-up might have ultimately been for nothing, however, as can be intuited by the Washington Post’s recent article and reading between the lines of whatDeputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewskitold them therein. According to him,

“We started to prepare ourselves for a more conventional kind of war”, but that’s no longer anywhere near as relevant as it was before the Ukrainian Conflict.

“It turned out that cheaper means, namely drones, can be very successful and make very important tactical gains on the front line”, he acknowledged, “especially in comparison to very expensive, more conventional armaments.”

After September’s Russian drone incident, which the Polish deep statetried to exploitto manipulate the president into war, “we understood that our air defense, including this lower layer against drones, required very quick development, which we are doing as quickly as possible.”

Nevertheless, despite Poland’s conventional military build-up over the past decade becoming more and more irrelevant due to the lessons learned from the Ukrainian Conflict, Zalewski justified the aforesaid on the basis that

“Russians best understand the language of power. Russia attacks only those who are weak. They do not take risks.”

The innuendo is that the enormous costs of this increasingly outdated policy, including opportunity ones related to socio-economic and other investments, deterred Russia.

Source: Global Research