In an official statement, the U.S. State Department announced its approval for a potential Foreign Military Sale to Poland, encompassing an Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS) and associated equipment.
The estimated cost for this system is $4.0 billion. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) formally informed Congress of this potential sale on September 11, 2023.
According to the release, “The Government of Poland has requested to buy phase two of a two-phase program for an Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS) enabled PATRIOT Configuration-3+ with modernized sensors and components.”
The deal would involve the provision of ninety-three (93) IBCS Engagement Operation Centers (EOCs) and one hundred seventy-five (175) IBCS Integrated Fire Control Network (IFCN) relays. In addition to the main components, the package would also comprise network encryptors, software development for IBCS, flight test infrastructure and tools, technical support, and various related elements of logistical and programmatic support.
This prospective sale serves to underscore the commitment of the U.S. in bolstering the defence capabilities of its allies. As the statement notes, the sale would “support the foreign policy goals and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in Europe.”
Additionally, the acquisition will significantly upgrade Poland’s missile defence capability, fostering greater interoperability with both the United States and other NATO allies.
The key contractor for this large-scale defence project will be Northrop Grumman, located in Huntsville, AL. While Poland has requested offsets as part of the arrangement, specifics will be determined through negotiations between Poland and the contractors.
It’s important to note, as mentioned in the release, that this notification of a potential sale is mandated by law, and the final dollar value might vary based on definitive requirements, budget considerations, and any ensuing sales agreements.
At the rate Poland is re arming we can just let them take care of what’s left of the Russians on their own.
They will have the most powerful army in NATO soon maybe eclipsing the US army if they keep going at this pace.
But with none of the high level intel and EW capabilities?
Although how much of that us actually need to fight the Russian slugfest is increasingly debatable.
But, seriously, the Polish army will make them proud and feel safe with that level of equipment. Poland’s response to Mad Vlad’s expansionism ‘nada’ – they don’t want to feel the Russian or any other jackboot.
Interesting their response as compared to that of Hungary. Similar histories in many ways and experiences with Russia even both alienated in the EU presently but very different outlooks. Poland has probably a greater history of direct conflict with Russia mind over many, many centuries so that is probably the factor of variance and being arguably the oldest still existing Country in Europe (it claims it through its establishment in the 10th C after defeat of the Celts) but with only several hundred years of independence since, I guess history is not only important but teaches it that power is it’s only chance of sustaining long term independence this time around. Quite right too having to resit against Russians, Germans, Swedes, Ottomans etc, here in the west of Europe it’s a little easier if naïve to become complacent on the matter.
I’d be more concerned if I were Hungary with the Transnistria situation on my doorstep.
Though I guess that area has the advantage of mountains.
Poland doesn’t possess Nuclear Weapons though – that’s pretty important.
Give them time😂😂😂
The military balance in Europe is changing and Poland’s military expansion may appear to be encouraging at this time however, should we be concerned? With military might come political temptations and that may be worrying for NATO core strategies? The methods by which Poland was squashed by Germany and then subjugated by Russia demonstrate its current intent to be a strong modern military state. She is the only country in NATO that is responding to Russia’s aggression at a pace and magnitude, which is in stark contrast to the UK and its weak excuses for not rapidly rearming the UK Army commensurately to the level of threat.
Yes, have to say Poland’s geographic position, history and prosperity and the way it is handling Ukrainian refugees and re-armament qualify it as moral leader in Europe. The Italians also, having been left by France and Germany to shoulder most of the immigration burden are shaking Europe up. Interesting to see the French and German response.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-german-plan-for-eu-inner-circle-with-membership-for-uk-pkhn5vsmm
The so-called bastions of the EU, Germany and France are facing significant social costs just like the rest of us. The plain truth, this Ukrainian war has come at precisely the wrong time, a perfect storm, which has driven many defence budgets to the ragged edge. However, the most precious thing in life is freedom and it costs, even if some vital components of modern society are harmed. Ensuring Britain has a strong defence force is pivotal if we wish to be key players in the World and remain at the top table at both NATO and the UN. Without the UK’s significant military clout would render it weak and subject to adverse political pressures. As for the EU, it is consummately failing to govern and Italy is not the only member to begin to question its value?
I’ve always believed the UK and Germany should have formed a joint trading market in the 1950s as the UK had been instrumental in kick-starting the post-war German economy and some may say, at great cost to its own industry. We are witnessing an increasing collaboration between British and German armament companies, the Boxer and CH3 being a good case in point. Obviously, there are other collaborations outside defence and this should be strengthened, which could lead to a UK hybrid formal trade agreement with a limited number of member countries. This would challenge the EU but in its current state and dogma-driven policies it may begin to lose the undying bond with key members.
Actually I see current events ( immigration and Ukraine) as reinforcing original EU ‘dogma’ ( =
principle, maxim, or tenet held as being firmly established) – specifically the principles of the common weal and the common destination of goods. Georgia Meloni is the character (“ Italy will not be the refugee camp for Europe”) who is reminding France and Germany what mutual assistance means in practice; holding them to account.
Good point about Germany. After his visit there Charles is in France this week. HM Gov have clearly tasked him with the diplomatic lead in rebuilding relationships with FR and DE, I may be over optimistic but ironically I see the UK as having a key post Brexit role in stabilising a weak EU through new strong bi-lateral defence and trade relationships with FR and DE. I think the US would want us to do this. It would be a natural extension of the lead we have shown in arming Ukraine. Also it makes sense for us to work with FR in Africa to defeat Wagner.
Well said 👍
No we shouldn’t, Poland’s military spending spree is done at the cost of reduced social spending, the Poles aren’t happy with their government going further in debt just to arm themselves to the teeth, it seems like overkill
the Poles are not happy about this crippling expense, but seem to prefer independence over clean balance sheet (and learnt from history that alliances are not much help in the hour of need).
Poland is the only country to respond to Russian aggression? UK supplied NLAWs helped blunt the initial assault in February last year, we were the first to send tanks and Storm Shadows have caused carnage, destroying a Kilo class submarine, possibly destroying a landing ship, killing a major general and hitting multiple important bridges.
We’ve punched well above our weight and are the third largest donor, behind only Germany and the US. Countries like Poland are going to be naturally more suited to support Ukraine because they have a large amount of ground based systems and ex-soviet equipment that can easily fit into Ukraine’s military. We can’t exactly donate an Astute class submarine or a Typhoon.
I’m not criticising the UK’s donation of arms to Ukraine and as you point out our contribution has been pivotal. What I’m concerned about is the core structure and mass of the current British Army, which appears to be drip feed with vital equipment at a time of war in Europe. The UK won’t field a modern-equipped land forces until 2030 at the earliest and that is a huge risk if matters in Ukraine expand beyond its borders. Before you say Russia is unlikely to expand its operations, Putin would use bulletproof farm tractors driven by pensioners if he knew he could win ground.
The U.K. defence budget has made no changes in direction and available money is less than previous year. It’s a disgrace that of all nato members only the U.K. and Croatia thought it’s a good time to spend less on defence. Everyone else increased budgets.
Donations to Ukraine are a separate matter.
The issue is where is the money going to come from? We have the highest tax rate since ww2 and public services falling apart all over the place because of cuts. No question cost of living is hard for average person and so more taxes isnt really an option. The economy is in a pretty bad place. Governments can’t just print money, ask liz truss what happens when you make spending promises that are not budgeted for.
We weren’t the first to send tanks, we were behind several other nations and sent at same time as Germany and the US. We were however the first to announce they would be sent, the time between announcing and sending was pretty significant. Subtle
but important difference.
Poland are no longer going to be supporting Ukraine with any weapons. Seems sensible thinking has finally landed. They realise they need to support their own military instead of equipping foreign ones👍🏻
🏴🇬🇧
Poland stopping supplies to Ukraine is a political move, they have an election coming shortly and the topic of spending on the military is a hot one. Many Poles believe it’s excessive and they may have a point, Poland’s economy simply can’t support the scale of military spending their government wants. Once their election is over support will most likely resume. The other issue for Poland is they’ve effectively run out of ex-soviet equipment to give at this point.
How is Poland affording this massive re-armament drive? Its GDP is only just over 21% of the UKs. It is the biggest net recipient of EU funding and is not burdened by the costs of hotels etc for illegal immigrants. But it is buying new equipment at full market prices across a wide spectrum and at scale.
Poland expects to spend 4% of its GDP on Defence this year, and if you are wondering how, it’s simply a priority. We spent between 4% and 5.5% of our GDP during the 1980s because we felt threatened by the Cold War. We spent even more in earlier decades. Now Rishi only feels threatened by Kier Starmer and budgets accordingly.
It’s also worth mentioning that if you don’t faff about and just buy COTS/MOTS instead, your money goes a lot further.
It’s true, shows what you can do when you have access to the sea and a big credit card. That’s how Britain won two world wars. Army’s can be built in years, navy’s take decades.
It’s amazing what is possible when the political will is there.
Agreed, but they still need to find the money. 4% of a GDP of@$690b is just £22b. Of course, they won’t have some of the expensive kit the UK does- nuclear deterrent, SSNs, aircraft carriers – but by focussing tightly on what they need to deter/ defeat the only real threat they face, they seem able to get an awful lot of kit. UK, in contrast, tries to have a bit of everything but with a flat budget, in ever diminishing numbers.
Poland is a land country with only a small coast line on an enclosed sea. Their military reflects ‘close by’ land and air defence
Also Poland has taken in millions of refugees. Far more than the U.K.
Well it’s next to Ukraine, so has kindly taken refugees. UK has had massive net migration for decades which Poland has not experienced, indeed previously net emigration and low birth rate.
GDP PPP 2022 Opendatabank
UK 54602
Poland 43268
Poland is determined to not be a speed bump if Putin decides to take this to the next level. Good on them, makes you wish Sunak could understand that.
What exactly does Sunak need to understand? Britain remains Europe’s foremost military power, and no further armament is required, from a pragmatic viewpoint. Britain will not compete with the US for power, so why spend more when the country is safe under the umbrella of its own military, NATO and America?
No further armament is required? That sort of thinking in 1930s really panned out well.
In the 30’s we were the global policeman with France and no other powerful Allie’s with a massive global empire. Today we only have to defend ourselves and contribute to the global rules based community with dozens of Allie’s. Big difference.
That did not go too well on the 1st September1939, it might explain the Polish mindset.
And look how that worked out for the Falklands. We managed it but the whole thing could have been avoided if we’d had 3-4 full-sized carriers with squadrons of Phantoms and Buccaneers.
It’s dangerous to assume that we’ll always be acting as part of a coalition. Also, the resources we can commit to said coalition are tiny compared to what they were even 20 years ago.
A year later Invincible would have been sold, Hermes retires and Falklands lost. Would even the monarchy survived the shock?
Even worse very dangerous result for the world since it would embolden the Soviets, Gorbatchev probably would not get promoted.
I am convinced that Soviets did not tried anything crazy only because the loopsided result their Arab allies got from Israelis in air to air combat and the Falklands.
Our forces have been hollowed out, we have no depth and no ability to sustain losses.
That’s what needs to change. We’ve seen in Ukraine that a modern war against a peer or near-peer adversary will incur significant losses on both sides. Our forces have been all but tailored to fight insurgencies and numbers have been cut on the assumption that we won’t incur any significant combat losses of aircraft, ships, tanks etc.
The numbers we have also mean we’d struggle to fight a war without the US as our main ally.
If the US appears politically weak (as it will from time to time) it’s essential from a deterrent point of view to have a strong credible alternative for our enemies to worry about.
That’s why UK and France maintain a nuclear deterrent — would Pres. Biden really respond (ending the world as we know it) if Russia dropped a couple of nukes on Poland? Having three decision makers for nuclear response complicates things and makes it less likely that Russia would ever nuke anyone. We need the same conventional backup capability too, but nobody currently backs up the US, certainly not Macron or Sunak. So when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, Russia decided it was okay to invade Ukraine as there was unlikely to be a fast strong NATO response. It doesn’t matter whether they were wrong; the point is the calculation was made and the war started.
Perhaps Poland sees itself in that role now the UK is increasingly seen as politically weak. Sadly, the only things that indicate strength of will to our enemies before the fact are a) spend and b) growth in the size of the armed forces.
👍 🍺
Do you really really think Putin is going to attack a Nato country ?
Surely you know this would mean nuclear war
So if Russian tanks rolled into Poland, do we go to immediate nuclear war, or do we wait till Germany falls. Or better yet wait till they’re at the Channel. It’s a deterrent, if it’s not deterring it’s failed as a weapon system.
If Russian tanks rolled into Poland, the threat of nuclear escalation would come from the Russians, who in a couple of days of fighting the whole of NATO would lose Kaliningrad and most if not all of it’s Airforce, Army and Navy in range of NATO.
Russia can’t even invade Ukraine – to invade Poland ( and then have to fight NATO ) would be a massive disaster for them.
Putins tanks didnt even make it to Kyiv, 200 miles from its own borders or 80 miles from the northern thrust through Belarus
Whats this wait till Germany falls ?
You are just remembering the last war, decorum means I cant really say what I think on your claims
I didn’t claim this. I claimed the opposite- you are replying to ( and insulting) the wrong person, again.
No one asked to comment on my claims. But the fact is that the British Military has been completely hollowed out. Even the US agree that the British Army isn’t even a tier 2 army anymore. Defence spending needs to be a min of 3% GDP.
Semi serious Q would Germany defend itself? They have odd relations with Russia.
Yes Prime Minister
Does anyone know if Poland is buying these purely for their patriot systems, or would they be seeking to integrate their CAMM batteries as well?
Hard to say but my guess is they are trying to tie into the new IBCS system as soon as possible which opens up the door for compatibility and command and control across a whole new range current and future air defence systems.
Poland’s handling of refugees from Ukraine, its assertive re-arming and its growing prosperity give it moral and political authority in the EU. Italy is close behind in my opinion. They are fed up carrying the biggest immigration load and I’m impressed by the way they are rebuilding their navy. The original Franco-German EU ‘locomotif’ has run out of steam. Interesting to read in today’s Times and other papers that the French and Germans are proposing a sort of relaunch of Europe with an inner core of EU members. Be interesting to see how that goes. I can’t see Poland and Italy rolling over to please the old EU founders.
Said many times over the months Poland seem to be going down the right path ,well done to them 👍 but please can we have our sky sabre back now please 🤗 well needed back in the UK 🇬🇧
I think it was only the one Sky Sabre unit…. Lol 😁
It was one Fire Group. Each Battery has 2 apparently.
How many launch vehicles in a fire group & battery?
And how many batteries are we getting?
As always, unsure, but I think it may be 3 per FG plus 1 radar so 6 /2 per battery.
16 RA has, I think, 4 Fire Batteries, so possibly 24 launchers.
There was some detail on UKAFC Twitter recently, that the Batteries were split into 2 Fire Groups, and making comparisons with what Italian and German Batteries comprise.
It said the deployed Battery had 1 FG covering the Polish commitment while the other FG is the roulement GBAD element in the Falklands.
Going forward, CGS has said “Med Range AD to double” so make of that what you will. We know ER is coming, plus the new version to be developed with Poland.
I’d expect to see additional Batteries added to 16RA in due course, unless they just expand existing Batteries, the details of which will come out in the wash one day as MoD have already said there will not be a policy paper outlining changes as part of Wavell, or “Future Soldier Next Steps.” 🙄
One to keep track of as things develop.
That will do 😉
My last has disappeared already… but at least CAMM has been adopted by Poland on land and sea. That’s quite an achievement by MBDA considering all competition. And the A140s and their MK41s must have helped with the design upgrading of the T31s with the same giving the RN more strike capability.
This with all the other contracts shows just how expensive a large air defence system is. Still Poland is on the front line if Ukraine fails so it needs to be prepared.
Poland are putting the UK to shame , it’s time our government woke up and started to give the military proper funding
Poland now saying they will end Military support for Ukraine 🤔
Due to Zelensky and his government aggressively trying to sue Poland and 2 other EU states for maintaining a grain import ban. The Polish farmers were being negatively affected by Ukraine flooding the market with cheap imports. Poland said they were happy for the grain to transfer through their country but not to remain there. You would think that was fine but the Ukrainian government then took Poland to court.
If you try to sue an ally that is actively helping you in a war you’ve got to be utterly daft.
It does provide an insight into the perceived entitlement of the Ukrainian government
Ben Wallace alluded to the problem of demanding not asking when he said the UKs military hardware wasn’t ordered by Ukraine like we were Amazon Prime, next day delivery.
I think the Polish government have had enough.
Zelensky is going to have to stop the legal action and profusely apologise I think. If he doesn’t then Ukraine has lost a key ally. It’s going to be interesting if Zelensky has enough statesmanship to do the right thing and repair bridges.
I’m absolutely sure this is just empty threats, pre-election period in Poland, and a typical x-twitter spat out in the open (with Zelensky, following his officials much to blame too, frankly)
but, on a more real note, there actually isn’t that much that Poland has got to spare now for Ukraine. They’ve transferred to the Ukrainians an undisclosed, presumably small, number of their early Rosomak IFV variants, and then… that’s about all. There’s still this murky story of Polish P91 tanks, allegedly they had about 230 in total, supposedly transferred most of them to Ukraine, but they’ve only surfaced on photo-video materials once or twice. They could, realistically, give up a lot more of those Leopard 2A4s though…
The Polish have just suspend armament shipments to Ukraine for reasons of Ukrainian aggressive legal pursuit against a grain ban. That was a bit daft of Zelensky and his government.
Ben Wallace alluded to Ukrainian ingratitude and now even the Polish are frustrated.
I think Zelensky is going to need to apologise, stop the legal action and request resumption of aid.
Lets see how much pressure the yanks put on Poland in that regard -not good for unity – perceived or otherwise.
well, ‘the yanks’ have already made… inquiries for clarification of Poland’s position, so…