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

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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.

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Defense Reform: Whose Version?
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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.

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The General Staff: Planner or Commander?
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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

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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.

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Military Intelligence: Split, But Who's the Boss?
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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."

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Professional vs. Conscript, Territorial vs. Deployable?
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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

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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.

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Strategic Defense Review: Tool or Relic?
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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.

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Reform Now a Question of Political Will
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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