Summary
Editor's Note: This is the first in a two-part series on the Polish armed forces' evolving focus on Poland's geography and alliance options. The second part focuses on how NATO membership is influencing Poland's military modernization efforts.
The Polish armed forces are still undergoing the generational transition that began after the 1991 dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Integrating into the NATO alliance after decades of operating under Soviet-dominated systems demanded a near-total overhaul of the Polish armed forces. This has seen major shakeups in strategic doctrine, threat perceptions, deployment of forces, procurement priorities, technology systems and more. Old equipment must be upgraded, new equipment procured, forces must be appropriately trained, institutional knowledge must be created and a new officer corps must be formed. Needless to say, this has demanded significant investments of time and money, though the centrality of NATO membership to Poland's national defense strategy makes such efforts critical despite the costs.
A Challenging Geography
Because of Poland's location, it has often been a battleground upon which major European powers have fought. At the same time, Poland's location makes it critical to controlling or securing the Eurasian heartland. While Poland's geography has been at the center of its strategic weakness, it could just as easily be key to Poland's power projection under different circumstances.
Located at the heart of the North European Plain, Poland's geography offers it little in the way of natural defensive barriers. From the Baltic Sea in the north to the lesser Polish uplands in the south, Poland essentially comprises 700 kilometers (435 miles) of unbroken plain extending between its western and eastern borders. Depending on the political conditions of the time, Poland's location at the center of the flat expanse of the North European Plain can be a liability or provide opportunities, though most often it has been the former as a result of Poland's second strategic dilemma.
Poland does not have the strength to go head-to-head with Russia and Germany, its two ethnically distinct, much more powerful neighbors on its east and west unless one or both are significantly weakened or fragmented. Poland is weaker than both by nearly every measure. It has fewer people, less territory and a smaller economy, which translates into a much weaker military force than those of its heavyweight neighbors. This makes finding a significant foreign military partner or entering an alliance structure to guarantee Polish security an enduring strategic imperative.
Throughout the Cold War, this strategic imperative was met by Poland's membership — voluntary or otherwise — in the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact. Today, Poland participates in a variety of alliance structures and security guarantees as a member of NATO and the European Union. Polish membership in these structures affords it a historically unprecedented degree of security, but it also limits Poland's strategic options outside the two institutions.
A Geostrategic Position and Alliance Options
While we do not expect a definitive break in the NATO structure anytime soon, the security configurations in Europe left over from the Cold War are not likely to survive indefinitely. Poland has numerous alternatives to NATO given the number of neighboring states in similarly precarious situations seeking alternative security arrangements. Such states would see Poland as a strategic component of any such post-NATO arrangements given its centrality on the North European Plain. Some of the greatest geopolitical minds of the past century agreed with these states' assessment that Poland is one of the most important strategic pivots on the Eurasian continent.
Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that if Moscow regained significant influence over Ukraine, Russia would once again have the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state spanning Europe and Asia. Under such a scenario, which arguably exists today, Brzezinski believed Poland would be the most critical component in any effort to halt Russian expansion into Western Europe, declaring Poland to be the geopolitical pivot on the eastern frontier of a united Europe. Sir Halford Mackinder, considered to be a founding father of geopolitics, described Poland as the epicenter of the "belt of independent buffer states" that he saw as key to controlling the Eurasian heartland, which was in turn the key to controlling the whole world. In the wake of World War I, renown Polish Gen. Jozef Pilsudski believed that an alliance of states from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea led by Poland and including Finland, the Baltics, the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania — the so-called Intermarium — was the key to preserving Central Europe's independence in the face of stronger, hostile states to the east and west.
A somewhat similar strategic alliance is being attempted today through the revival of the Visegrad Group, comprising Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. This group would function as a bloc in various political and military forums and would include a proposed Visegrad Group battlegroup outside the command of NATO and the European Union. Poland is also the lead nation, meaning it has operational command of the unit — as it does in a number of other EU battlegroups — such as the Weimar battlegroup (Poland, Germany and France) and Battle Group 2010 (Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania). Through these various groups, Poland can orient itself in any one of these directions — northward to the Nordic and Baltic states, southward to the Carpathian belt, westward to the European core or eastward to Russia. The current security arrangements to the north, west and south reflect Poland's present imperative of moving away from the Russian sphere of influence.
