Poland’s Military Build-Up Might Have Ultimately Been For Nothing

The potential domestic political ramifications are more significant than exposing Poland as possibly having been a paper tiger all along despite now having the largest armed forces in the EU.

The Washington Post published an insightful piece in late January about how “Poland built the E.U.’s biggest army, but the threat has changed”, which persuasively argues that the central role of drones in the Ukrainian Conflict has prompted questions about Poland’s military build-up over the past decade. It now has the largest armed forces in the EU with over 215,000 personnel, thus making it the third-largest in all of NATO, and it also boasts the bloc’s highest military spending at 4.7% of GDP.

It’s now dawning on Polish policymakers that their country’s costly military build-up might have ultimately been for nothing, however, as can be intuited by the Washington Post’s recent article and reading between the lines of what Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski told them therein. According to him, “We started to prepare ourselves for a more conventional kind of war”, but that’s no longer anywhere near as relevant as it was before the Ukrainian Conflict.

“It turned out that cheaper means, namely drones, can be very successful and make very important tactical gains on the front line”, he acknowledged, “especially in comparison to very expensive, more conventional armaments.” After September’s Russian drone incident, which the Polish deep state tried to exploit to manipulate the president into war, “we understood that our air defense, including this lower layer against drones, required very quick development, which we are doing as quickly as possible.”

Nevertheless, despite Poland’s conventional military build-up over the past decade becoming more and more irrelevant due to the lessons learned from the Ukrainian Conflict, Zalewski justified the aforesaid on the basis that “Russians best understand the language of power. Russia attacks only those who are weak. They do not take risks.” The innuendo is that the enormous costs of this increasingly outdated policy, including opportunity ones related to socio-economic and other investments, deterred Russia.

That’s questionable since there’s no proof that Russia ever considered any unprovoked attack against Poland, not least because it’s a NATO member and Putin arguably doesn’t deem it worth risking World War III to occupy a hostile population for no reason. After all, he’s reluctant to escalate against non-NATO Ukraine even in pursuit of Russia’s legitimate security goals there, so he would never have plotted an unprovoked attack against NATO member Poland that would have jeopardized Russia’s very existence.

With this insight in mind, it can therefore be concluded that Zalewski and other Polish policymakers like him are trying to cope with the fact that their country’s costly military build-up was ultimately for nothing, wider awareness of which could turn the population further against their ruling duopoly. On that topic, over a fifth of voters support either of the country’s two patriotic-nationalist opposition parties, which could grow before fall 2027’s next Sejm elections and thus make them the kingmakers.

Accordingly, the greatest significance of the Washington Post’s recent article isn’t that it implies that Poland is a paper tiger (the argument of which was discussed here with regard to its embarrassingly underdeveloped military-industrial complex), but the potential domestic political ramifications. If the one-fifth of Poles who already want change grows to one-third partially in response to this, then they’d break their country’s ruling duopoly and revolutionize parliamentary politics after next fall’s elections.