Most Poles don’t believe army can defend them – poll

Despite repeated hikes in defense spending, a majority of Poles believe that their military is not capable of defending the country, according to a survey published in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Tuesday.

Carried out by SW Research, the survey asked respondents: “In your opinion, is the Polish Army prepared to defend Poland against aggression from another country?”

Just under 30% of respondents agreed that it is prepared, while 54.7% said it is not; 17.4% said they weren’t sure or had no opinion on the matter. Among 23-35-year-olds, the mood was even more pessimistic, with 62.5% believing that their military is incapable of protecting the state.

The Polish Army numbers around 205,000 soldiers, with plans to expand to 300,000, Chief of Staff General Wieslaw Kukula announced in July. Even at its current level of manpower, the Polish Army is the third-largest military in NATO, behind the US and Türkiye, respectively.

Warsaw has increased military spending annually for the last five years, going from spending 1.98% of GDP on defense in 2019 to 4.2% this year. In August, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that this spending record would be broken again next year, with defense spending increased to 4.7% of GDP. While the US is NATO’s largest military spender and has a defense budget roughly 21 times larger than Poland’s $39.9 billion, Poland is the bloc’s biggest military spender in terms of GDP percentage.

In this same time, Poland has embarked on an ambitious program of military modernization, purchasing US-made HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems, F-35 fighter jets, and Abrams tanks to replace the Soviet-era T-72 and PT-91 tanks donated to Ukraine.

This military buildup is squarely aimed at Russia, with Tusk declaring in March that the Ukraine conflict has plunged Europe into a “pre-war era,” and Kukula stating four months later that “we need to prepare our forces for full-scale conflict.”

Kukula reissued this warning earlier this month, telling officers in training that “everything indicates that they are the generation that will take up arms in defense of our country.”

Russian officials have repeatedly stressed that Moscow has no geopolitical, economic, or military interests in Poland or the Baltic states. Attacking Poland, a move that would enter Russia into a war with the entire NATO bloc, “is absolutely out of the question,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told American journalist Tucker Carlson earlier this year, adding that it “goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of global war.”

Nevertheless, Western support for Ukraine has essentially placed Russia in conflict with “the entire Western military machine,” Putin remarked last year.