White House Intensifies Military Buildup In Poland
Rick Rozoff
Immediately on the heels of reports in the Guardian and other Western news media that the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization has crafted a strategy to intervene with nine army divisions in the Baltic Sea area, President Barack Obama met with his Polish counterpart Bronislaw Komorowski at the White House and confirmed plans to increase U.S. military hardware and troops in the latter's country.
The two heads of state agreed on expanding bilateral military relations "in the spirit of the 2008 U.S.-Polish Declaration on Strategic Cooperation," [1] including the stationing of 16 U.S. F-16 jet fighters and four C-130 Hercules military transport planes on Polish air bases beginning in 2013.
The U.S. sold Poland 48 of the multirole warplanes earlier in the decade, delivering them between 2006-2008, and last month provided the third of five Hercules aircraft to the Polish military. According to a news agency report on the most recent delivery: "The C-130 aircraft are Poland's biggest transport planes. Polish crews used the planes to fly to Spain, Georgia, Iraq and Afghanistan." [2]
The American F-16s and C-130s will be based in Poland to join those sold to the nation and the U.S. fighters will participate in joint air combat exercises with their Polish opposite numbers.
U.S. F-15 jet fighters are currently completing a four-month rotation at the Lithuanian Air Force base at Siauliai for NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission. The F-15 Eagle is "a twin-engine, all-weather tactical fighter designed to gain and maintain air superiority in aerial combat. It is considered among the most successful modern fighters with over 100 aerial combat victories with no losses in dogfights." [3]
In addition to the American and Polish presidents confirming the above deployments, coming as they do after the stationing of U.S. Patriot Advanced Capability-3 anti-ballistic missiles and 100 troops to Morag, Poland - half an hour's drive from the Russian border - in May of this year, Obama also confirmed an even more menacing development: The Pentagon will forge ahead with basing Standard Missile-3 (SM-3s) interceptors in Poland, part of what the administration refers to as the Aegis Ashore program to adapt ship-based SM-3s for use on land. However, Washington will almost certainly add SM-3-equipped Aegis class warships to the mix with a continuous rotation in the Baltic Sea.
Obama "confirmed the commitment of the United States to implement the Phased Adaptive Approach to European missile defense, including basing land-based SM-3 interceptors in Poland as part of this program in the 2018 time frame, and expressed his gratitude for the commitment by the government of Poland to host this system." [4]
The White House also committed to assigning American 800 troops to Polish command in Afghanistan's Ghazni province and supplying 20 mine-resistant armored vehicles to Polish forces serving with NATO's International Security Assistance Force.
The following day President Komorowski met with former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
The SM-3 has a standard range of 300 miles (500 kilometers), but the SM-3 Block II variant is enhanced for extended range and velocity. On September 17, 2009 Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to abandon the George W. Bush administration project to base ten ground-based midcourse interceptor missiles of the sort based in Alaska and California in silos in Redzikowo, Poland in favor of a "smarter, stronger and swifter" deployment of a graduated, layered interceptor missile system in Eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
Seven months ago the first phase - the installation of a U.S. advanced Patriot missile battery - was effected in eastern Poland.
Much as with the earlier, now discarded, ground-based midcourse missile plan, Washington and its NATO allies claim that PAC-3 and SM-3 deployments are in response to non-existent or at any rate far-fetched threats of long-range missile attacks by so-called rogue states: Iran, Syria and North Korea. Thirty countries in total according to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who adamantly refuses to list the putative villains.
Iran does not possess, is not in the process of acquiring and is not capable of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles able to be launched over the Arctic Ocean to the U.S., so SM-3s in Poland with a current range of 300 miles cannot "protect" North America and Europe from an alleged Iranian missile threat. The distance between the capitals of Iran and Poland is almost 2,500 miles, so any intercept of an Iranian missile by an American SM-3 would have to occur over Ukraine. (And possibly Belarus. If the range of SM-3s in Poland were to be extended, and with the same interceptors in Romania, the countries of the South Caucasus and Russia's North Caucasus could suffer fallout even if in theory debris is to be burned during reentry.)
SM-3 and Patriot anti-ballistic missiles are what the Pentagon and its Missile Defense Agency refer to as kinetic - "hit-to-kill" - weapons that officially are not equipped with an explosive warhead and that destroy an incoming missile on contact. The USS Lake Erie guided missile cruiser launched an SM-3 into the exoatmosphere over the Pacific Ocean on February 21, 2008 to destroy an American satellite with a kinetic warhead.
However, as Washington acknowledges that North Korea has nuclear weapons and accuses Iran of pursuing them, a missile collision involving a nuclear warhead over the territory of a third nation is an inevitable danger entailed by U.S. and NATO missile shield deployments.
The U.S. cannot pretend that Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles in Poland are in any manner aimed toward and at any nation other than Russia. The American missiles and troops in the Baltic Sea city of Morag are near the border of Russia's Kaliningrad district where the Interfax news agency revealed on December 7 that, in addition to NATO recently elaborating plans to intervene against Russia on behalf of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the military bloc's "plans to surround and crush Russia's military forces in the Kaliningrad region (the country's westernmost region) were drawn up at least five years ago." [5]
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