Making Poland’s Military Great Again

The arrival of the heaviest military equipment in the West will herald the Polish government's pledge from July 2021 to "radically increase" the country's defence capabilities and to expand the Polish Armed Forces to a staggering 300,000 personnel - a combination of the regular professional army and part-time volunteer Territorial Defence Force, which was created in 2017.

Given that the current numbers are, respectively, 113,000 regular active service men and women and 32,000 TDF, this would entail a doubling of the army's size. According to experts, that's a tall order which may never ultimately be delivered.

U.S. Marine Corps M1A1 Abrams tank engages targets at night during live-fire training as part of exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2018 at Ustka, Poland, June 9, 2018.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons Braced for war

The sense of heightened alert in Poland has been amplified by several events over the past year.

First, there were the images of thousands of migrants storming Poland's eastern border, part of a "hybrid war" conducted by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. In the summer of 2021, the autocrat began creating this new migratory route by tempting migrants from the Middle East and Africa to Minsk, then herding them across the border in retaliation for EU sanctions imposed after Belarus's rigged 2020 presidential election, as well as to help serve Russian President Vladimir Putin's goal of destabilising NATO and the EU, security experts say.

Fears of a new Russian attack on Ukraine are also playing a role. Towards the end of 2021, Russia began amassing 100,000 or more troops plus tanks and other heavy weaponry on the Ukrainian border with Russia and Belarus, on the back of unsubstantiated...