Poland wants to turn its weapons-buying spree into an arsenal for NATO

KIELCE, Poland — For four days last week, the sprawling halls of Poland’s largest defense exhibition offered a glimpse of the country’s changing military ambitions.

Alongside the tanks, missiles and drones displayed at the annual Miedzynarodowy Salon Przemyslu Obronnego (MSPO) arms fair in Kielce, executives from some of America’s largest defense companies repeatedly sat down with their Polish counterparts to sign agreements aimed at bringing more of their production to Poland.

Lockheed Martin announced another step toward manufacturing components for its PAC-3 MSE Patriot interceptor with Polish state-owned defense companies. Shield AI signed an agreement to explore producing its autonomous X-BAT combat aircraft in Poland.

Anduril, meanwhile, is already working with Poland’s state-owned defense conglomerate PGZ toward local production of its Barracuda-500M cruise missile.

For years, Poland’s military buildup has been defined by the sheer volume of weapons Warsaw has bought from abroad.

Now, after becoming one of the world’s biggest defense spenders, Poland is attempting something more difficult: using that buying power to transform itself into one of NATO’s major weapons manufacturers.

“We’re building the largest land army in Europe,” Deputy State Assets Minister Konrad Golota told Reuters ahead of MSPO. But increasingly, he said, it also matters that the equipment Poland’s soldiers use is made at home.

Polish defense procurement from domestic companies, including joint ventures with other Central European firms, has almost quadrupled since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, reaching about $8.2 billion last year.

“If you want to sell in Poland, you have to invest in Poland, you have to transfer technology, you have to work on joint projects with us,” Mr. Golota said.

From buyer to manufacturer

Poland’s rearmament since 2022 has been extraordinary in scale.

Warsaw plans to spend more than $50 billion on defense this year, close to 5% of gross domestic product, while its armed forces have grown beyond 220,000 personnel. American Abrams tanks, F-35 fighters, Apache helicopters, HIMARS rocket launchers and Patriot air-defense systems have been joined by South Korean K2 tanks, K9 howitzers and Chunmoo rocket artillery.

Speed initially mattered more than where those weapons were manufactured. But the second phase of the buildup increasingly revolves around technology transfer and supply-chain independence.

The shift was visible in Kielce.

Lockheed Martin and Poland’s Wojskowe Zakłady Elektroniczne, or WZE, highlighted an upcoming production order for Polish-made attitude control sections, critical components used to maneuver PAC-3 MSE interceptors in the final stage of flight.

The first Polish-made components are expected to be delivered to the United States in 2027.

“Poland is a rich source of engineering talent and offers strong manufacturing capability,” Brian Kubik, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s PAC-3 programs, said during the show. “Our partnerships in Poland strengthen the supply chain while delivering leading capability to our customers around the globe.”

PGZ, WZE and Raytheon also signed a document related to production of energy-storage assemblies for the new LTAMDS radar being introduced into the Patriot system.

With demand for Patriot interceptors surging and Western inventories strained by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Poland is gradually moving inside the supply chain of one of America’s most important air-defense systems.

Buying technology

A similar model is emerging with a younger generation of American defense companies.

Shield AI signed a letter of intent with PGZ and WZL-2 at MSPO covering the potential design, production, delivery and sustainment in Poland of X-BAT, an autonomous vertical-takeoff combat aircraft. The agreement envisages Polish industry potentially producing aircraft for customers outside Poland as well.

Anduril has already partnered with PGZ on local assembly and eventual production of the Barracuda-500M, a relatively low-cost autonomous cruise missile, while pitching its Fury autonomous aircraft and Thunder rotorcraft to Warsaw.

The emerging strategy is less about Polish industrial autarky than making the country an indispensable node in American and European weapons supply chains.

That is also increasingly evident in ammunition, missiles and the less glamorous components required to keep a military fighting. Polish companies are expanding domestic capacity in explosives, propellants and ammunition components, areas where the war in Ukraine has exposed serious bottlenecks across NATO.

At MSPO, Polish defense companies also signed agreements covering production and technology transfers ranging from Bushmaster cannons to unmanned aircraft and air-defense launchers.

Lessons from Ukraine

Ukraine’s defense industry offers Poland both a warning and a model.

The war has demonstrated how quickly weapons can be consumed in a high-intensity conflict. But it has also produced an ecosystem in which small defense companies can develop systems alongside soldiers, modify them according to battlefield experience and return improved versions to the front in weeks rather than years.

“The critical lesson learned here when it comes to defense generally is procurement, how the procurement system changes,” Freddie Bradshaw, business development lead at Ark Robotics, a defense robotics company with operations in Ukraine and NATO countries, told The Washington Times at MSPO.

“Within Ukraine, units hold their own purse strings. They can go out, they can purchase the capability or the effect that they require on the ground. That is not necessarily the case across the board within NATO.”

Poland, he said, is “at the more innovative end of the spectrum,” increasingly recognizing the need for flexible contracts that allow defense companies to continue modifying systems after procurement rather than freezing designs for years.

The relationship between Ukraine and countries such as Poland could increasingly become complementary.

“Cutting-edge innovation is in Ukraine at the moment,” Mr. Bradshaw said. NATO countries, he added, can bring “the scale of manufacturing” and the budgets required to turn battlefield innovations into mass-produced weapons.

Billions for Polish factories

Warsaw will have an extraordinary amount of money with which to test that proposition.

Poland has secured more than roughly $50 billion in loans from the European Union’s SAFE defense program, the largest allocation of any EU member. The government says 89% of the resulting orders will flow into Polish industry and the wider economy.

Roughly $12.5 billion is earmarked for artillery, $11.6 billion for air and missile defense, drones and counter-drone systems, and another $6.2 billion for ammunition and missiles.

At MSPO, Polish manufacturer MESKO signed an implementing agreement for another batch of Piorun shoulder-fired air-defense missiles. Poland is also positioning the weapon for purchases by other European countries through SAFE, including Norway, Lithuania and Latvia.

That points toward the next stage of Warsaw’s ambitions: exports.

The challenge will be turning contracts and technology-transfer agreements into functioning production lines quickly enough to matter.

Poland’s defense industry still faces shortages of skilled workers, limited production capacity in some sectors and the difficulty of absorbing a remarkable number of programs simultaneously. Building factories and signing localization agreements is easier than producing missiles, ammunition and armored vehicles at wartime rates.

But the direction of travel was difficult to miss in Kielce.

Poland spent the first years after Russia invaded Ukraine racing to buy the weapons it believed it needed to fight a war. Increasingly, Warsaw wants the next ones to come from factories at home.