POLISH DEFENSE TRANSFORMATION AT A STRATEGIC

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 WARSAW 000497 SIPDIS SIPDIS STATE FOR EUR AND EUR/NCE SECDEF FOR ISP JOINT STAFF FOR J5 EUCOM FOR ECJ4 AND ECJ5 E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/06/2016 TAGS: PGOV MCAP PREL MARR MASS PL SUBJECT: POLISH DEFENSE TRANSFORMATION AT A STRATEGIC CROSSROADS REF: WARSAW 177 WARSAW 00000497 001.2 OF 003 Classified By: Polcouns Mary T. Curtin for reasons 1.4b and d. ¶1. (C) SUMMARY: Despite its position as a minority government and ongoing domestic political battles, the Marcinkiewicz government is beginning to define the future strategic direction of the Polish military. In the coming months, the parliament will consider bills that would radically reorganize command structures of the Ministry of Defense (MOD),General Staff and Service commands, in addition to replacing the Military Information Services (WSI, Poland,s military intelligence agency) with two new organizations and moving toward a professional military. The GOP's choices will directly affect its ability to contribute to NATO and coalition military operations. Defense Minister (DefMin) Radek Sikorski and the military leadership seem to understand the need for dramatic reform, but the political atmosphere may slow key initiatives. END SUMMARY. -------------- Defense Reform: Whose Version? -------------- ¶2. (C) At least four competing visions for the future of Poland,s military and defense establishment are circulating within GOP circles, though none has yet emerged as definitive. Former Deputy DefMin Andzrej Karkoszka, appointed in October 2004 by the previous government to direct the MOD,s Strategic Defense Review (SDR),has conducted a comprehensive and objective analysis of the Polish military,s missions, capabilities, and requirements. However, Karkoszka is associated with the previous, post-Communist government and also served in pre-1989 communist government positions, earning him deep suspicion from the current government, led by the post-Solidarity, strongly anti-Communist PiS party. ¶3. (C) PiS,s leadership, including President Lech Kaczynski and his brother, PiS Chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski, are influenced by nationalistic sensibilities and a domestically focused political agenda. They are committed to maintaining a strong and capable military, though do not appear to have a coherent program for achieving this. PiS included military reform issues in their 2004 campaign platform and their goals, including dissolving WSI and changing the command structure, are now part of the legislative agenda agreed to by PiS and its parliamentary partners, Self Defense (SO) and the League of Polish Families (LPR). But the details are still in the works. DefMin Sikorski, a senior fellow for the past few years at the American Enterprise Institute brings his own theoretical views to the table, informed more by international theory than domestic politics, while MOD U/S for Defense Policy Stanislaw Koziej spent the past four years 2001-2005 at the National Defense Academy after being dismissed from a lesser MOD policy job by the previous government. -------------- The General Staff: Planner or Commander? -------------- ¶4. (C) As part of the overall defense transformation, there is consensus in both civilian and uniformed military circles that the Armed Forces command structures have to change. The leading proposal for this restructuring comes from DefMin Sikorski, who wants to shift the General Staff from de facto command of the Armed Forces to strategic planning (along the lines of the British Defense Staff),advising the GOP,s senior leadership on long-range defense and security issues. Currently, the General staff is responsible not only for strategic planning, but also for managing current operations and for directing virtually every aspect of the armed forces, peacetime activities. Sikorski hopes to transfer peacetime oversight of the Polish military to a new Armed Forces Command (AFC),a joint structure which would assume functions currently exercised by the separate Service Commands (Land Forces, Navy and Air Force),as well as by the various administrative and logistical support elements. The Services, senior hierarchies would then assume the role of service "staffs" under the AFC,s commander, who himself would report directly to the DefMin, rather than to the Chief of the General Staff. Command over military operations would WARSAW 00000497 002.2 OF 003 be exercised by a Joint Operational Command (JOC),a considerably expanded version of the existing Operational Command that serves as the General Staff,s current operations center. Sikorski's stated goal is to align Poland's command system with "existing NATO standards" as well as to facilitate organizational cooperation with the U.S. and other key partners. Along those lines, he has also expressed a desire to create a Special Forces Command compatible with SecDef Rumsfeld's recent proposals in Sicily. ¶5. (C) On February 27, President Kaczynski appointed LtGen Franciszek Gagor, Poland's representative to the NATO Military Committee as the new Chief of the General Staff (CHOD). Gagor was promoted to LtGen simultaneously with his swearing in, having been appointed to the post over several more senior officers. It is noteworthy that the position is now designated a three-star billet, while Gagor's predecessor Gen Piatas had four stars, indicative of the General Staff,s and the CHOD,s changing roles. LtGen Edward Pietrzyk, Commander of the Land Forces Command, and previously a leading candidate for the CHOD post, will likely head the new AFC following its creation, also in a three-star capacity but directly subordinated to the DefMin rather than to the CHOD. It remains unclear exactly how the General Staff, JOC and AFC will interact with each other or with the DefMin and the President, though military observers are concerned that the various stove piped organizations will undermine unity of command in the armed forces. -------------- -------------- Military Intelligence: Split, But Who's the Boss? -------------- -------------- ¶6. (C) Anti-corruption fervor, combined with anti-Communist rhetoric, is driving GOP efforts under the cabinet minister level and Special Services Coordinator Zbigniew Wassermann to thoroughly reform the Polish domestic and foreign intelligence services, including the MOD,s Military Information Services (WSI). Current draft legislation calls for WSI to essentially be dissolved, replaced by two new services -- foreign intelligence and military counterintelligence. Wassermann sought to shift supervision and operational control over military intelligence activities to his office, but in the draft legislation, DefMin Sikorski has been able to maintain at least MOD,s ownership over these organizations. To date, neither PM Marcinkiewicz nor President Kaczynski have publicly declared themselves in this dispute, although Kaczynski appears to have prevented Wassermann's plan from moving forward without further discussion. ¶7. (C) Wassermann advocates creating two leaner, more disciplined intelligence services to replace one unified military organization. In an effort allegedly aimed at purging "Soviet and East German trained officers," Wassermann proposed aggressive vetting and manpower reductions that would leave a newly created military intelligence agency with half the staff of WSI,s current foreign intelligence branch. Although much of the political rhetoric against WSI has targeted its alleged Communist-era legacies, the GOP,s main focus is on reigning in WSI,s alleged lack of accountability and corruption, from leaks of confidential information to the media to involvement in "inappropriate commercial activity." Sikorski has agreed on the need to remove the pathological connections between WSI and the civil economy or media." -------------- -------------- Professional vs. Conscript, Territorial vs. Deployable? -------------- -------------- ¶8. (C) Force restructuring is another crucial element of any transformation, but the GOP,s prevailing political ideology has complicated efforts to professionalize and streamline the Polish armed forces. Poland has struggled with defense transformation since its transition to democracy began in 1989, but only since joining NATO in 1999 and deploying to Iraq in 2003 has the GOP really taken the challenge seriously. Poland,s defense establishment under former DefMin Szmajdzinski (2001-2005),who launched the SDR, progressively moved toward a military that was "professional, capable, deployable, interoperable, and expeditionary." However, the current government's nationalistic and WARSAW 00000497 003.2 OF 003 Russo-phobic outlook is pressuring DefMin Sikorski and his staff to maintain both a robust territorial defense capability and the current conscription base. During the ceremonial opening of a U.S.-sponsored SDR simulation (attended by President Kaczynski's Chief of Staff Andzrej Urbanski, as well as senior officials, generals and U.S. and UK observers),Sikorski himself admonished the organizers for not including a Russian-Belarusian attack scenario as one of the tests of future Polish capabilities. In a meeting with DCM to discuss overall Polish transformation, Deputy DefMin Alexander Szczyglo (a close Kaczynski associate) spoke at length about not only the Russian threat, but also the need to maintain a large conscript pool as a social mechanism to instill patriotism in Polish youth. ¶9. (C) Although it seems unlikely in the short term that the Polish armed forces will move toward either a fully professional or all-conscript force, there is significant operational pressure to increase the proportion of professional service members. Polish law allows only professional (contract/volunteer) troops be deployed overseas, and there are not enough at present to meet existing or imminent commitments to the NATO Rapid Deployment Force, UN peacekeeping, and EUFOR (Bosnia-Hercegovina). Furthermore, the Iraq mission has highlighted the need for fully professional units, which could deploy as organic battalions or brigades rather than as composite units. In each of the six Iraq rotations to date (from 2,500 troops in 2003 to some 900 today),the Polish contingent has been a patchwork of sub-units and individual soldiers from all over the Polish Army; the first all-professional battalion was constituted in late 2005, but is not yet fully deployable. -------------- Strategic Defense Review: Tool or Relic? -------------- ¶10. (C) Begun in October 2004 and similar in scope and intent to the U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR),the SDR is Poland's first comprehensive assessment of the structures, goals, capabilities and requirements of the Polish armed forces over the next 15 years. An ambitious effort managed by Karkoszka, his deputy BGen Waldemar Czarnecki and a few dozen officers and civilians, the SDR focuses on how the Polish armed forces should be organized and developed to meet future defense challenges and international commitments. Alone within the Polish Defense establishment, the SDR has considered all aspects of transformation, including acquisition and integration of NATO-interoperable C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) capabilities; responsive logistics systems; and, air/ground transport platforms to enhance self-deployability and sustainability -- all within the context of realistic budget projections through 2020. -------------- Reform Now a Question of Political Will -------------- ¶11. (C) COMMENT: As the governing PiS party has little foreign policy or defense expertise of its own, the success of defense transformation will depend on the degree to which DefMin Sikorski and seasoned, non-political experts can inform and channel the party's nationalistic instincts. Even as the internal philosophical debate continues, DefMin Sikorski has put forth an aggressive transformational budget, focused on fielding a fully professional NATO-deployable brigade within the next four years and dedicating at least 20 percent of the defense budget to acquisition and modernization of equipment. It is clear from their continuing efforts to better define and more efficiently allocate planning and command functions and to reform military intelligence that the MOD and General Staff leadership understand the need to shift from territorial defense to expeditionary capability, However, persistent government resistance to full professionalization for domestic policy reasons will be a continuing drag on defense reforms for the foreseeable future. END COMMENT. ASHE