The decision over a medium range anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems to be provided for polish army seems to have been ultimately made in favor to US –made “ Patriot” batteries. It is thought to be the most lucrative among all the projects ever undertaken by the Ministry Of Defence . At the same time, a doubts arose whether it would have been to avail on our creeping defence industry while so many other were already lined- up to compete. Nevertheless, military experts are now getting down to heated discussion over the fact of the compatibility with systems currently remaining in service, also including vast array of other aspects. Apart from that, It is disputed if the “Patriots” offered us and based on ageing PAC-2 missiles could be fully capable of dealing with all sorts of aerial threats to be posed nowadays, especially in case of enemy’s cruise missiles that can fly on low altitudes what makes themselves a very difficult target to intercept , especially at final stages of approach . We need to acknowledge the fact most of them were deliberately made in order to break through enemy’s air defence and thanks to inbuilt precision- guidance systems that allow matching flight trajectory to terrain features - they are falling onto their targets with a pin-point precision . Such technology had before been implemented into “ Tomahawk” cruise missiles and which were widely used during the Gulf War while raining on hardly accessible targets inside Iraq in bid to destroy Saddam’s strongholds. Although ‘Patriots’ have proven its capability when bringing down Iraqi “ Scud” missiles during both Gulf wars , there were some setbacks ,especially when one of missiles was locked on to a coalition military jet during its final approach to landing what resulted in the aircraft’s two- men crew death in this accident. The loss of the British ’ Tornado GR4” precision bomber was the example of ongoing miscommunications between warning systems that were responsible to secure the risk of friendly fire. The technology has significantly moved forward since that time, so today this can hardly be taken as a referring point. Finally, our shares with the implementation of the newest PAC-3 MSE seem to be rather symbolic as for The US’ well- known unwillingness to share out their ‘space-aged’ technology with anybody , even within NATO allies. The same goes for the US “ high –end “ F22 Raptor stealth fighter while it has not been allowed to elsewhere. Although we still hope for F35 jets in the future to replace MiG 29.
As only Warsaw Pact collapsed in the early 90’s we fell far behind to other NATO members , lacking on an advanced equipment while the great number of post –Russian equipment is quickly becoming outdated and needs soon to be taken out of service or replaced with next generation armament . Some equipment has recently been going over to a partial modernization process but in general, it does not add up a lot to its final result and there is still awful lot to be done to fill technological gap