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US military hardware coming to Poland [76]
Jacek Bartosiak
Bartosiak is an expert on geopolitics, not that much on the military, however in case of air-defence he's right. Polish air defence should be focused mainly on "aerodynamic" targets, not the ballistic ones. Russians have so many Iskanders and other long range weapons that any kind of "shield" against them will not be effective. The best defence against them is to:
1. Spread out your forces and other assets.
2. Buy short range ballistic missiles (which are not really that expensive) and hit back the enemy, his airfields, bridges and other "fixed assets".
Besides, the future of western medium range systems (all of them: Patriot, MEADS, SAMP-T) is not clear (are there going to be new versions developed, when, how much will they cost) and they are extremely expensive. We should first go for short-range systems, in this case all except missiles (which are 30-40% of total costs) can be Polish made, missiles could be produced under license, so ~85% of money would stay in Poland. Besides missiles such as CAMM ER, AMRAAM ER or Derby have range of about 50 km, so that's basically something in between short and medium range and still several times cheaper.
In case of medium range air defence we should either:
1. Go for some intermediate solutions, for example take a few 2nd hand batteries of older Patriots from Yanks, promise them (but nothing on paper) that If they provide them nearly for free, we will buy the new generation Patriots in the next decade (when/If they actually exist).
2. Buy Chinese HQ-9s
3. Forget totally about Patriots and such, the new Derby ER is said to have a range of nearly 100 km and it should be still much, much cheaper as has no "anti-ballistic" capabilities, which are not really that needed in Poland, at least not worth their price.
But generally I doubt (unfortunately) that the new government is going to change the strategy. I won't be surprised If in ~2 years they will actually strike the deal with the same Raytheon. The problem here is that we are talking about the systems that cost tens of billions and will be in service for the next 30-40 years. It's not a matter of buying a bottle of vodka. That process require a damn load of work, not only technical evaluation, also financial side, industrial cooperation etc. Pretty much nothing was done by previous "government" - they likely just took several million from the "lobbyists" (who thought, If the next guys are so pro-American, they won't dare to cancel it) and that's why they "recommended to buy Patriots". Nothing more was done, that's why the whole process need to be started from the beginning.
Ballistic missiles cost much more than a short range Patriot missile.
Now go and check the cost of PAC 3 MSE.