WARSAW, Poland — Poland is seeking new joint ventures and purchases from American defense contractors that could be financed by European loans, according to Konrad Gołota, Poland’s deputy state assets minister.
Warsaw plans to expand its armed forces following Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. The growing Polish defense budget is already fueling a shopping spree for weapons and gear, including acquisitions of fighter jets, tanks, helicopters, rocket launchers and missiles from the United States.
“We are modernizing our Army. We are building now the biggest EU land Army, focusing on the protection of external borders, focusing very much on securing the Baltic Sea region,” Gołota said during an Dec. 5 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
Money for new military acquisitions will be sourced from the country’s defense budget which is to absorb additional funds of roughly €44 billion ($51 billion) in low-cost loans under the European Union’s Security Action For Europe (SAFE) scheme, recently allocated by Brussels.
Poland’s defense expenditure “next year will be 4.7% of GDP, it will be around $55 billion,” the deputy minister said.
Gołota said the Polish government wants to involve U.S. producers in additional procurements of weapons and equipment that could be bankrolled by SAFE loans.
However, Warsaw hopes to go beyond buying off-the-shelf products. Poland is planning to use the funds to finance more joint ventures and transfers of technology from American players to the Polish defense industry with the use of European loans.
“We are using a lot of American equipment,” according to Gołota. “We have spent over the years in signed contracts $60 billion in the U.S. … only in defense. So it’s a substantial expenditure. We think that the perfect matching is … when your companies, which are already cooperating with our companies, will take it one or two levels higher.”
U.S. defense industry players “need to decide which technologies they are able to transfer, and, of course, we are in dialog with the [U.S.] administration,” Gołota said.
Jaroslaw Adamowski is the Poland correspondent for Defense News.
