Warsaw and Moscow are certain to view the remarks as evidence that the shield could be used to deter Russia, despite regular public statements to the contrary.
In meetings in Warsaw a year ago, senior U.S. officials also unveiled a menu of possible US military deployments in Poland in response to years of Polish pressure to get “US boots on the ground”.
The confidential US diplomatic traffic dealing with the missile shield, military links, and Poland’s constant angst about its insecurity and vulnerability to Russia, reveals acute differences between Washington and Warsaw over the deployment of U.S. Patriot air defences in Poland which started earlier this year. Under the Bush administration, Poland agreed to host ten missile interceptors for a proposed anti-ballistic missile defence system, a project that triggered a crisis in U.S.-Russian relations. Barack Obama abandoned the scheme in September last year, under his policy of “resetting” relations with Russia.
The Pentagon and NATO are developing a more modest and mobile phased missile shield, inviting the Russians to take part. At a NATO summit in Lisbon last month, the allied leaders agreed for the first time to press ahead with the project and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia was cautiously positive on the prospects for Moscow’s co-operation. In November 2009, Alexander Vershbow, the assistant defence secretary for international security, offered the Poles a role in the new project by hosting a land-based “standard missile-3” system, as seen in the leaked U.S. embassy cables.
The Poles, who have repeatedly told the Americans they do not feel threatened by Iran but are regularly alarmed about Russia, asked “a series of hypothetical questions on the adaptive nature of the system vis-à-vis the changing threat.
“With regard to how NATO might defend itself from missiles coming from elsewhere than Iran or Syria, BG John Hesterman of the joint staff said that seaborne platforms could provide surge capability against threats from an unforeseen direction, land-based sites could be upgraded with more interceptors if the scale of the threat were increased, and radars could be reoriented,” the U.S. embassy in Warsaw reports following the meetings.
A series of cables going back over the past two years highlights the Polish eagerness to try to draw the U.S. military, NATO assets, and possibly military bases into Poland, and a clear U.S. ambivalence and wariness, sparking furious rows and mutual exasperation.
“The Polish prime minister’s chief of staff, the president’s deputy national security adviser, and the speaker of the Polish parliament expressed unanimous support for a large US military footprint in Poland ... Most important for Poland is U.S. involvement in Polish security, through physical presence of American forces in Poland, NATO facilities in Poland, fulfilling the commitment to provide Patriot missiles,” the embassy reports.
Six months later, Alexander Vershbow, U.S. assistant defence secretary for international security, offered an alternative to the promised Patriots “which the U.S. believed may be more useful to Poland”.
“The three options presented were: 1) a quarterly rotation of F-16s, and the establishment of a small permanent support detachment, which would focus on enhancing Polish fighter capabilities, increasing sortie readiness and meeting NATO commitments; 2) quarterly C-130 rotations from Ramstein [airbase in Germany], also with a small permanent support detachment in Poland with the goal of increasing Polish readiness and ability to support own and Nato operations; 3) the relocation of a US naval special warfare unit from Stuttgart to Gdansk or Gdynia [on the Baltic coast].” The Poles were enthusiastic, seeking to maximise the U.S. offers. In February this year, the defence minister, Bogdan Klich, told the U.S. ambassador, Lee Feinstein, in Warsaw, that Poland was interested in all the options, particularly the F-16 fighter aircraft. Under government cost-cutting, Poland was closing down 20% of military facilities “but would be saving three complexes for US forces,” Klich said.
Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, also told Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, that Warsaw was interested in the F-16s. Stanislaw Komorowski, the deputy defence minister and former ambassador in London who did most of the negotiating, died a month before the Patriot battery arrived in the presidential air tragedy at Smolensk in Russia that killed scores of the Polish elite.
