Biden announces permanent US military base in Poland, America’s first on NATO east flank

President Joe Biden has announced that the United States will establish a permanent military base in Poland. It is the first time the country has done so anywhere on NATO’s eastern flank, which up to now has only had a rotating troop presence.

“In a moment when Putin has shattered peace in Europe and attacked the very tenets of rule-based order, the United States and our allies are stepping up,” said Biden after arriving in Madrid for a NATO summit.

Among the new measures announced today by the US president is the establishment of a permanent headquarters in Poland for the US Army’s V Corps. This “will improve US-NATO interoperability across the eastern flank”, said the White House.

Biden also revealed that the US would maintain an additional rotational brigade in Romania, enhance rotational deployments in the Baltic region, deploy two squadrons of F-35 aircraft to the UK, station additional air defence in Germany and Italy, and seek to increase the number of destroyers stationed in Spain.

Poland’s government, which has for years been pushing for Western countries to take a stronger line against Russia, welcomed the announcement.

“This is extremely important,” deputy foreign minister Paweł Jabłoński told the Polish Press Agency (PAP). “It is in countries on the front line of a potential attack that the presence of command structures is extremely important so that they can directly respond to threats that are most real here.”

Biden’s announcement “is a strategic statement that is key to the security of NATO’s eastern flank and the whole of Europe”, retired Brigadier General Jarosław Kraszewski told broadcaster TVN.

“This [new permanent] command will play a key role,” he added. “Taking into account those elements that are already deployed in our country and the Baltic states, NATO, through the US army, will be able to take immediate action [against threats].”

Lieutenant General Waldemar Skrzypczak, the former commander of Poland’s land forces, told TVN that, as well as the military benefits of Biden’s decision, it also has a “political dimension” of “showing Putin unequivocally the will of the Americans to support NATO’s mission in this part of Europe”.

The US V Corp, which was stationed in West Germany during the Cold War, has already had a forward command post in the Polish city of Poznań since last year, manned by 200 soldiers operating on a rotational basis.

While the US has in recent years boosted its rotational troop presence in Poland, the Polish government has long been pushing for a permanent base – with President Andrzej Duda going as far as to suggest at a White House press conference in 2019 that it could be called “Fort Trump” in an effort to persuade his US counterpart.

Earlier this year, amid growing tension between Russia and Ukraine, the Biden administration announced the deployment of 1,700 additional US troops to Poland, bringing its total forces in the country to around 10,000. It also announced the deployment of two Patriot missile batteries and transferred a number of F-16 fighter jets there.

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

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.