Rita Flaherty, vice president of strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, announced that twenty HIMARS missile sets ordered by Poland will be delivered next year.

‘With increased production, I think we can meet the deadline and deliver the HIMARS ordered by Poland in 2023’, said Flaherty.

In 2019 Poland purchased 20 long-range multi-barrel rocket launchers (18 combat and two exercise) and related equipment. The introduction of this category of armament was written into the Homar modernisation programme. Initially, it was assumed that the system would be developed by local factories, later that it would be a licence production.

In May this year MON asked the US to prepare an offer for another approximately 500 HIMARS sets. However, the manufacturer did not give guarantees for quick deliveries, so in the second half of October, the Defence Ministry signed a contract for the delivery of almost 300 multi-launchers with the South Korean arms industry. The first elements of the Chunmoo system will be delivered to Poland next year, at a similar time to the HIMARS systems.

Flaherty stressed that other systems, including the Korean one, should not be called HIMARS. ‘I am not questioning the choice of the MON as it has to deliver due to its defence commitments, but there are some key differences between the systems’, she said.

Flaherty assured that the corporation is open to cooperation, and one of the projects currently under discussion is to locate a regional support centre for the system in Poland. She announced that the company is also ready to cooperate with Polish industry in connection with the procurement of Javelin anti-tank missiles, jointly produced by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, on systems such as the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter and on PAC-3 MSE missiles, selected in the first phase of the Vistula programme as armament for Patriot systems.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński