The Ministry of National Defense intends to buy several hundred HIMARS launchers for the Polish armed forces. “We have made a decision to strengthen the Polish artillery by leaps and bounds. We have ordered around 500 HIMARS rocket launchers. The implementation of this order will make us an artillery power”, said Minister of National Defense Mariusz Błaszczak.
The head of the defense ministry emphasized that the modern equipment of the Polish Army is designed to deter a potential aggressor and show that the attack on Poland will not pay off.
“We cannot save on security consistently arming the Polish Army with modern weapons, increasing the size of the army and building its interoperability with allied forces”, said Minister Błaszczak.
He noted that the government started modernizing the army in 2018 by purchasing Patriot batteries. In the following years, it will purchase HIMARS missiles and F-35 planes. Mariusz Błaszczak assured that this year the scale of orders is much larger due to the Act on the Defense of the Fatherland and the fact that the Armed Forces Support Fund is being prepared.
The first contract for the acquisition of the US missile artillery system was signed in 2019. The Ministry of Defense then ordered 20 launchers, and the contract provides for the first deliveries next year.
Under the agreement, Poland ordered 30 packages of six missiles with a range of 70 kilometers and 30 missiles, which are designed to destroy objects up to 300 kilometers away. The head of the Ministry of National Defense assessed that the purchase of several hundred HIMARS missile artillery systems is a significant strengthening of the Polish army, and the decision to purchase them is the result of careful observation of the conflict in Ukraine,
HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) is a system of launchers on wheeled chassis produced by Lockheed Martin, which allows hitting targets on land (and possibly at sea) at a distance up to about 80 or 300 kilometers, depending on the type of rocket.
Arkadiusz Słomczyński