Why Poland’s air defense failed to shoot down a Russian missile during the shelling of Ukraine
It is indicative of the situation when a country invests heavily in weapons, but still does not have reliable protection.
On December 29, 2023, when Russia conducted a massive missile strike against Ukraine, it was A Russian missile was also recorded entering Polish airspace. So far, it is only known for certain that it could have been an X-101 or X-22, and that Polish air defense was unable to shoot it down.
According to Polish media reports, Poland’s military and political leadership is now deciding what to do next. And ordinary Poles are trying to understand how it happened that despite such large-scale investments in strengthening national defense, their anti-aircraft gunners once again failed to prevent the missile threat from Russia.
Against this background, a publication from the Polish portal Defence24 is quite revealing, as it is a kind of reaction to these events and an attempt to somehow explain what is happening. And there, the authors of this agency set out very interesting “internal” conclusions about this situation, which are worth paying attention to.
Perhaps the most telling point is that Defence24 emphasizes that citizens need to be told that no air defense system in the world is capable of covering 100% of the country’s territory. And that anti-aircraft missile systems, especially in the case of Poland, are a means of covering important military and critical infrastructure in the first place.
It turns out that the Poles are now proposing to “simply put all available SAMs on the border with Ukraine, and thus prevent Russian missiles from entering.” To which Defence24 decided to answer as follows: Poland does not really have enough SAMs to put them on the border and create a dense “curtain” against Russian missiles.
Indeed, Poland has placed a large-scale order for the supply of as many as 46 Polish-British Narew air defense systems worth up to $8 billion, but currently has only two systems of this type in service. Delivery of the bulk of these systems is scheduled for 2027-2035.
In addition, the authors of Defence24 raise the question that before you can shoot down an air target, you need to actually detect it, and there are problems with this. Allegedly, Poland will be able to deploy the first division with radar surveillance balloons only in 2026, and two AWACS aircraft of the Saab 340 AEW type ordered in the summer of 2023.
And to ensure constant patrolling of F-16 fighters, we need our own “air tankers,” and the Polish Air Force does not have this class of aircraft either. The above arguments also illustrate that over the past year, Poland’s air defense capabilities have not seen a significant leap forward, which is quite telling.
