In a letter to President Andrzej Duda, trade unions have criticised the government’s purchase – announced last week – of 250 M1A2 Abrams tanks from the United States. They warn that the deal could result in the loss of thousands of Polish jobs.
“The Abrams purchase, apart from the horrendous price, carries a number of negative, even catastrophic consequences,” reads the letter, signed by figures from Solidarity, Poland’s largest group of trade unions, and the head of a union at a Polish tank plant.
With an estimated cost of over 23 billion zloty ($6 billion), the deal for the tanks is the Polish army’s largest ever purchase. It was arranged through an intergovernmental procurement agreement with the US and includes no offsets (elements boosting Polish industry), reports Business Insider Polska.
The latest version of the M1A2 Abrams tanks, the SEPv3, has been in service since 2020. Poland is set to become only the second country in the world – after Australia – to receive them from the US. The government has has hailed it as “the most modern in the world” and said that it can act as a deterrent against Russia.
The newly purchased tanks would replace Poland’s Soviet-era T-72 tanks and their later successor, the PT-91, which was designed domestically by the Research and Development Centre for Mechanical Appliances (OBRUM) and produced by the Bumar Łabędy company, part of a Polish military consortium.
The trade unions warn that the new Abrams – which are scheduled to begin delivery next year – will result in the gradual shutdown of the Polish mechanical plants that repair the PT-91 and German-made Leopards. This, they say, would in turn result in thousands of job losses.
I to by było na tyle, jeśli chodzi o inwestycje w polski przemysł zbrojeniowy (tu lotniczy). Tak dla przypomnienia: Caracale miały być produkowane w Polsce..ale PiS wolał zerwać kontrakt… https://t.co/rvJsUOZEKD
— Jacek Czarnecki (@JacekCzarnecki1) July 20, 2021
Experts have also warned that the procurement deal, which was conducted without a tender, does little for Poland’s domestic arms industry. Retired Lieutenant General Mirosław Różański, former general commander of the Polish Armed Forces, said that the tanks would be “bought according to American standards”.
“If we wanted to install any Polish components, such as communications, only the Americans could do it,” Różański told Business Insider. “They have the ‘copyright’ to this tank.”
Moreover, the trade unionists argue that operating three different types of tanks – each requiring different equipment for servicing and using different weapons – would prove expensive. “Most modern armies in the world are based on one type of tank and successively develop and adapt it to their own needs,” they wrote.
In their letter to the president, they also flagged concerns with the Polish Industrial Policy programme for the domestic arms sector unveiled by the ministry of development in June.
The authors of the document ignored the “importance of the arms industry for the entire economy” and even “deliberately strove to marginalise domestic enterprises”, they wrote.
The union proposed a number of policies to bolster the domestic arms industry, including changing making technical documentation available in tenders, increasing R&D funding in the arms sector, and pumping more capital into domestic companies to improve technical infrastructure.
Main image credit: Markus Rauchenberger/7th Army Training Command (under CC BY 2.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
