Putin’s Ukraine Invasion Makes Poland The Linchpin Of U.S. Military Plans In Europe

In the years since U.S. military strategy shifted to focus on great power rivalries, Taiwan has come to be regarded as pivotal to the future of Pacific security.

If China were to invade and occupy the island nation, it would be a sharp regional turning point, marking a profound setback for U.S. security.

Today, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another country has assumed similar status in U.S. military plans.

That country is Poland, the NATO member that now will likely share the longest border with hostile territories under the control of Moscow.

The prevailing view among Kremlin watchers in the West is that Putin is intent on rebuilding the buffer of satellite countries between his nation and the West, if not recreating the old Russian empire.

Putin certainly did nothing to discourage that view when he demanded in the runup to the Ukraine campaign that NATO cease military operations in former Soviet republics and satellite states.

With the gradual reabsorption of Belarus into greater Russia and the expected installation of a Russian puppet regime in Kyiv, Poland will inevitably become a critical venue for East-West military rivalries in Europe.

The good news is that Poland is an advanced economy of 38 million with close ties to the West, a member of both NATO and the European Union.

Unlike other countries that now face the prospect of sharing a common border with the new Russian empire, it has the material wherewithal and cultural unity to defend itself in any conflict short of nuclear war.

Whatever tensions may have previously existed between Warsaw and other Western capitals will now be largely forgotten in the face of Russian aggression.

However, the bad news is that Poland is already half-surrounded by territories likely to be under the control of its enemies.

In addition to its 600-kilometer border with Belarus and Ukraine in the east, the heavily militarized Russian enclave of Kaliningrad occupies a strategic position on the Baltic Sea to the north.

Russian air defenses located in Kaliningrad and western Belarus cover most of Polish territory, and the entire country is well within the unrefueled combat radius of Russian tactical aircraft.

To make matters worse, there are few geographic obstacles on the North European Plain to slow a westward advance by ground forces coming from Belarus and Russia.

So, if Poland is to defend itself in a future installment of Putin’s campaign of conquest, it will need to be heavily armed.

At the moment, it isn’t: the country has fewer than a thousand tanks, and its modest air force of 452 aircraft contains only 91 fighters.

Much of the equipment is old, and would not fare well in a war with Russia’s recently modernized forces.

Although Poland is one of the few European NATO nations that has met the commitment to invest 2% of GDP in military preparations, U.S. military planners have recognized since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 that the country will require heavy assistance to defend its territory in a war.

Washington has gradually moved to provide Warsaw with advanced military equipment suited to the defeat of Russian forces, most notably in the form of 32 F-35 multirole fighters, the first of which it’s scheduled to receive in 2024; up to eight batteries of Patriot integrated air defense systems, which will start to arrive at the end of this year; and—most recently—a deal for 250 advanced versions of the M1A2 main battle tank.

Each of these weapons outclasses Russian counterparts, but it will take years before most of them reach Polish forces.

Given the inscrutability of Putin and his plans, Poland may not have years—Washington needs to think about accelerating the delivery of modern weapons to Warsaw.

One key facet of U.S. military plans that predated the Ukraine crisis was the dispatch of rotating American forces into Poland on a regular basis.

In recent years nearly 5,000 U.S. troops have been in Poland on any given day, and a command infrastructure has been established to coordinate the activities of NATO forces throughout the region.

Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine has likely settled the debate about whether the U.S. troop presence in Poland should be rotational or permanent: permanent deployment of at least one U.S. armored brigade is now highly likely.

Washington has been investing for years in infrastructure and prepositioned supplies to support troop rotations, so it should be possible to stand up a permanent U.S. ground presence quickly.

The value of that permanent U.S. presence will transcend its tangible warfighting capabilities by signaling to Moscow that any invasion of Poland would inevitably lead to direct war with the United States.

The U.S. maintained a similar “tripwire” defense of Western Europe throughout the Cold War.

Poland has a number of features beyond its geographical location that recommend the nation as a pivotal player in Western security.

Unlike Ukraine, Poland is ethnically homogenous, has a vibrant free-market economy, and a liberal political culture.

Its people also share a profound cultural awareness of the danger posed by Russia—a danger that traces back to the efforts of Catherine the Great to partition the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth centuries ago.

Few countries have so frequently suffered the outrages of alien invasion, and yet these repeated atrocities seem to have forged a strong sense of national identity that will make Poland a reliable ally of the United States in the years ahead.

That’s a good thing, because with Russia on the march, Poland now looks indispensable to the defense of the West.