Poland must develop its defence industry to achieve strategic independence

By Eugeniusz Chimiczuk

This article is published in cooperation with the Jagiellonian Club think tank.

Unable to produce sufficient supplies of its own munitions, Poland is currently reliant on imports. Strategic independence, digital sovereignty and the chance of a technological leap for other branches of the economy are all reasons for developing its own arms industry. The main obstacles are unrealistic planning and poor decisions from politicians. What could the government do to prevent further promising projects from turning into failures?

Polish successes

The Polish defence industry has recently registered several successes. The country’s scientists have implemented many complex programmes with impressive added value in a country with a much lower technological potential than its competitors.

The Topaz integrated command system is one of the best of its type in the world, superior to its counterparts from Germany and the USA. Further successful products are the SAMOC and Łowcza-Reha anti-aircraft defence systems and SCOT ship command system. Polish industry has also developed radar, communications, optoelectronics, radioelectronic and hydroacoustic reconnaissance technologies, as well as unmanned systems. These are all world-class technologies, in many cases successfully exported.

Just when it seemed that the situation in the defence industry was improving and there was a chance to move up a level, however, the modernisation process began to falter. The numerous successes prove not just the high competences of Polish scientists and engineers, but also the weakness of state institutions. What are the ailments plaguing the country’s arms industry?

Domestic industry or foreign purchases?

Does Poland even need an arms industry? Opponents argue that munitions imported from abroad are cheaper, tried and tested, and not saddled with the risks that research and development programmes bring. They also note that purchasing arms can be an element of foreign policy.

According to a frequent argument in the public debate, developing an arms industry brings additional costs, delays and inconveniences for a country’s army, and is nothing more than a badge of politicians’ power play. But this is not the whole story.

Foreign systems must be adapted to local requirements, while also maintaining long-term ammunition reserves and conducting detailed tests to check the quality of the equipment. This all means major costs, meaning that the supposedly lower costs of foreign armaments can shoot up.

In 2010–2013, Switzerland decided to carefully test and evaluate multirole aircraft before buying them. Rigorous tests on four aircraft were so costly that the remaining funds were only enough for the cheapest one, which did not satisfy most requirements. The programme was ultimately scrapped. It is therefore not surprising that tests of foreign equipment in Poland are so rare and too superficial. They often only last a few hours, increasing the risk of finding many defects at a later stage.

Foreign purchases often boil down to “parade-ground modernisation”, when only individual military units are rearmed with the latest equipment, while the rest of the army make do with museum relics. The Polish army simply cannot afford to buy “luxury equipment” abroad, which is why it is forced to turn to homegrown producers.

The representatives of Polish industry often stress that their production is designed for mass orders and the army’s real needs, taking the local budgetary reality into account. Poland has the biggest need for equipment in Europe, as it is currently mostly using outdated supplies and the army is relatively large. In the next 15 years, the defence ministry plans to spend 500 billion zloty on rearming. This creates an enormous market to be exploited by either the Polish economy or a foreign one.

Another reason for Poland to develop its own arms industry is strategic independence, allowing the country to survive and defend itself regardless of the turbulences of global politics. Poland still has no production of modern and reliable ammunition for tanks as well as guided armour-piercing and anti-aircraft missiles and rocket artillery. Yet these are an essential part of today’s defence arsenal.

Unable to produce key types of ammunition and weapons of its own, Poland must spend billions buying them abroad. This equipment is not only needed for a potential war, but also in constant use during military exercises. Ammunition supplies account for the lion’s share of maintenance costs for any modern armaments system during its life cycle, estimated to be at least 30 years.

By relying on external supplies, Poland exposes itself to the risk of price fluctuations and limited production capacity of the contractor, which might have other contracts to implement. It would be easier to plan production at home.

Digital independence

An even greater challenge is so-called digital sovereignty. Apart from the obvious mistrust in foreign software that Polish counterintelligence services cannot certify, there is also the problem of how quickly producers react to new cybernetic threats on a local scale.

No less important is collection of current data on opponents’ arms systems, which makes it easier to identify their equipment based on signals more precisely. Notably, none of the NATO allies possesses a permanent SIGINT (intelligence gathering by interception of signals) installation in Central Europe. Controlling information systems, means of communication and signals intelligence today is largely tantamount to status as an independent state.

The Polish army needs such armaments as basic deterrents, especially after the end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the return of this class of armaments to Europe. Yet international agreements such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) prevent such complete weapons or the technology for their production from being exported.

Defence industry drives the economy

Development of the arms industry makes solid sense for the economy. New technologies mean that profits can be kept high regardless of the economic situation. Highly developed countries have never gained technological advantage through free competition alone – in the United States, South Korea and Israel, advanced military technology research resulted in industrial innovations later applied to daily life.

Government orders for Polish industry have many significant advantages over market investments. These include interest-fee funding of risky investments in research and development and advanced production lines. Production capacity can then be put to dual use, to increase the robotisation of industry – and this is extremely important in Poland’s context.

New technologies mean that a small number of well-qualified personnel can create high-added-value products. A sufficient support level for an ageing population can thus be maintained. This type of economic model could provide a lifeline to counteract the negative demographic trends in Poland. Competing with western technologies could be very difficult without the aid of development of the arms sector.

Polish universities are well equipped to launch a modern arms industry and the country’s factories have the necessary production potential. Polish industry is often a supplier for western companies, which are happy with the quality and smoothness of deliveries. And funds are not a problem – Poland spends more than 2% of its GDP on defence.

What is stopping the Polish defence industry?

In 2017, Bartosz Kownacki, the then deputy defence minister, listed the problems of the Polish arms industry. The common denominator of the pathologies he revealed was delays, usually counted in years. Failure to keep to timetables usually does not result from innovation – in many cases the engineers had a model to follow. Often, unrealistic planning makes it impossible to complete the work on time. Another common problem was commissioning development of equipment with imprecise, and even contradictory and unfeasible specifications. Underfunding also had an impact.

Even when work is finished punctually, the army does not always collect it on time. With the Bystra radar, two of the three reasons for the 33-month delay in R&D work were “atmospheric conditions” and “problems with provision of ammunition and assigning a training ground”.

Such explanations show that the Polish army officially admits to not having the time and resources to collect equipment. Lack of management personnel, an underfunded armaments inspectorate and inefficient administration of the existing resources and infrastructure mean that even a technically sound project becomes a failure.

The defence ministry’s R&D programmes fail to take a key factor for Polish industry into account – time. An R&D programme must be implemented long before the purchase programme, to give the product time to mature before entering the market. Furthermore, to maximise the “Polishness” of products it is necessary to keep a record of the production and research possibilities of Polish companies and research institutions and to actively talk to them about potential participation. Such cooperation is missing at present.

What is needed is appropriate supervision of projects. This does not mean cost estimates, but continuous contact with the contractors, regular tests and realistic demands. The Polish military set expectations that no contractor in the world is capable of meeting at a sensible price.

One example is the Kleszcz reconnaissance vehicle (subsidised by the National Centre for Research and Development – 26 million zloty). The requirements were sent to the contractor three years after the programme started, causing a 34-month delay.

Even when the guidelines arrived, they were hardly coherent – a scout vehicle should not stick out, but this one was to be mine-proof, making it heavier, higher and more noticeable. It was also to have the capability of fighting helicopters using a machine gun, which similar units do not usually have. This added problems with both physical engineering and information systems.

What can be done?

Implementing such a project on time and within a reasonable budget means abandoning certain competently analysed requirements to remove the programme from the impasses.

Another way of dealing with endless R&D work would be to introduce “agile” management methods. This would entail buying equipment satisfying only the physical demands, with software to be streamlined after the armaments are put into experimental service, as the Americans did in their F-35 aircraft.

Such an approach makes it possible to repair hardware and software faults as they appear as well as introducing new functionalities using software patches (in the same way as we update a telephone).

In addition, so-called retrofitting makes it possible to bring pre-production and test parts of equipment to the standard of a mass product, cutting the costs of numerous prototypes. Engineers are thus spared the most time-consuming and labour-intensive research on additional software functionalities and able to focus on the qualities that will define the equipment for decades of use.

Not the only problem

Further stumbling blocks for the modernisation of the Polish army are poor management of the various state companies and unstable employment of the people responsible. Only certain projects can be implemented in private firms, where the administration situation is considerably better. But this field too is not immune to interventions of politicians, who arbitrarily eliminate certain companies from the procedures.

Paradoxically, the direct award of many lucrative programmes to state companies ultimately reduces the “Polishness” of the product. The firms in the Polish Armaments Group often offer foreign licensed products, even with minimal participation in production, rather than a fully Polish product from a private enterprise. This is an effect of the approach of politicians, for whom PR is more important than actual participation of Polish industry.

For good armaments to be produced in Poland, the government should seek to maximise the participation of both public and private Polish entities in arms programmes. Instead of intensifying collaboration, however, Polish producers battle each other and lose out to foreign rivals.

Spending wisely

Another problem of the Polish arms industry is financial management. Funds are certainly available – looking at the budgets of the various institutions, we see hundreds of millions of zloty spent on numerous research programmes. Many are so-called “blue skies research” – mostly theoretical programmes, with implementation a long way off. Three such examples attracted funding of 93 million, 52 and 76 million zloty.

These funds are insufficient to achieve anything in prospective weapons – the USA, Russia and China spend much more, and are still far from success. And the 221 million zloty could be used to bolster more mundane, but still essential radar, combat vehicle or command system programmes.

While the defence ministry is trying to produce electromagnetic weapons, Polish industry does not have the funds to develop and produce classic ammunition, which will probably be around for a while to come. The task of Polish scientists should be to catch up with highly developed countries, and only then to begin the race for groundbreaking technologies. Certain stages of development simply cannot be skipped.

Efficient modernisation of the Polish armaments industry is within reach. But it requires major streamlining of management by state institutions. With its own armaments industry, Poland has genuine sovereignty not only in taking defence decisions, but also in a broader political sense. A sovereign country cannot depend on other players in security questions.

As the conflict in Ukraine showed, modern hybrid conflicts can last years, and in such cases even a large country can have problems with receiving equipment from abroad in the short term. Development of the armaments industry should be a priority in building a well-functioning state. Otherwise, Poland will remain a paper state until we lose our independence.

The original Polish version of this article can be found here. Translated by Ben Koschalka

Main image credit: KPRM/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Eugeniusz Chimiczuk is a national security expert for the Jagiellonian Club’s Centre for Analysis and formerly a lecturer at Lazarski University.