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Poland Strategy and Tactics
Until 1990 Polish strategic missions were determined by
the
country's assigned role in the Warsaw Pact. The overall
theme was
prevention of war in peacetime and defense of the Soviet
Union
and its allies in wartime. Through the mid-1980s, the
alliance
emphasized strategic offense over strategic defense, with
a
single strategic plan integrating the two aspects. The
plan
heavily emphasized overlap and cooperation of strategic
missions
in a combined arms format. The Soviet Union initially used
the
Warsaw Pact primarily to retain military and political
control of
its East European allies beneath a facade of collective
decision
making. Soviet dominance began to diminish in the 1960s,
however,
and by the 1980s the alliance had become a forum for
debate and
bargaining over issues of national independence and
autonomous
decision making. Until 1989, Poland's military leaders
remained
cautious in expressing independent views on questions of
strategy.
By mid-1990, international events fully revealed the
obsolescence of Poland's Warsaw Pact membership. The
anti-West
German rationale behind the alliance seemed especially
dated in
view of Soviet approval of German reunification and
Germany's
approval of the Oder-Neisse Line as the permanent border
with
Poland. In the summer of 1990, Czechoslovak and Polish
proposals
for substantial reform in the alliance structure brought
no
constructive response from the Soviet Union. Shortly
thereafter,
the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs began making public
reference to Poland's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and
the
pact's impending disintegration. Meanwhile, internal
strife in
the Soviet Union weakened the argument that deviation from
Warsaw
Pact strategic planning would provoke Soviet retaliation
(an
argument that in reality had been hollow at least since
Gorbachev's reform programs began in the mid-1980s).
Beginning in 1990, Polish military strategists and
tacticians
shifted toward defensive techniques over offensive
operations.
Their theories promoted a mobile, nonlinear defense based
on
enhanced force maneuverability. The new strategic defense
plan
included creating conditions favorable to a war of
maneuver,
constructing tactical and permanent fortifications,
protecting
the military communications network in wartime, and
preparing to
destroy key objectives to prevent their use by the enemy.
The
context of this program was defensive battle against
superior
forces, using terrain features to channel the enemy into
areas
vulnerable to a Polish counterattack. If this goal were
not
possible, the mission would be to extend the engagement
long
enough to raise the political cost to the aggressor by
making the
conflict a threat to general European security. Partisan
resistance after defeat of Poland's conventional forces
was
rejected because of projected human and material losses.
New
strategies featured defensive combat in the forested and
flooded
areas that predominate in the eastern border region--a
strong
indication of Poland's new threat perception. Air defense,
although labeled a top priority by Polish planners,
remained very
poorly defined and equipped in mid-1992
(see Armed Services
, this
ch.).
Strategic writings in the early 1990s contemplated no
action
outside Poland. In keeping with Poland's shifting threat
perceptions involving Kaliningrad and Ukraine, the
military
establishment agreed on a shift of force concentration to
the
eastern borders. Military districts were redesignated
accordingly
in 1991. Budget constraints and the lack of military
basing
infrastructure limited implementation of this policy by
preventing large-scale force shifts, however. In 1992
about 65
percent of Polish forces remained west of the Vistula
River
(compared with 75 percent in the Warsaw Pact alignment),
and
Polish defensive lines remained static, deep, and
echeloned, in
keeping with standard Soviet practice.
Data as of October 1992
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