Documents / FOIA release
This JPRS translation, dated 1 May 1993 and released by the Central Intelligence Agency, reproduces an article by Col. Marian Kopczewski of Poland's Higher Officers School of Antiaircraft Defense. The article appeared in a Polish air force and air defense journal. Kopczewski assesses the military threats Poland faces from its neighbors after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. He argues for restructuring Polish air defense into separate peacetime and wartime systems. He notes that during the Cold War any unidentified flying object was once taken as the start of World War III.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1993 ## Document 2 of 19 Page 2 of its neighbor countries and grouping them by the scale of eventual threat as follows: 4. 1. Countries that at present are no threat to us at all or only minimally: Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 5. 2. Countries that are a greater threat to us and that emerged from the former USSR. The situation in that region is still far from stable. 6. 3. Germany-there the threat consists of our economic and technological backwardness. As for the military threat, given the current international situation, it is hardly likely, but, in view of the huge military and economic potential of Germany, it has to be taken into account. 7. Thus, the political, and hence also the military, situation in Central Europe is exceptionally complex, and it may grow worse in the years to come. In extremal situations and the absence of successful political actions (a collective security system), Poland and, indirectly, other countries of Central Europe may find themselves in a kind of political encirclement (or isolation), leading to military consequences. ## 8. Structure of Perils 9. An assessment of the dangers to Poland and other countries of Central Europe prompts the conclusion that the traditional concept of massed air attacks against the territory of the former Warsaw Pact that might be carried out by the NATO air force is no longer a viable basis for planning air defense. Previously, the political and military conditions in Europe had been the principal cause of a widespread fear of a surprise air strike by the potential enemy. That fear or psychosis persisted even during periods of declared detente. Any unidentified flying object used to be interpreted by people as the beginning of World War III. Air-defense systems were often placed on alert status not by the potential enemy but by an accident, and such errors bore tragic consequences. For example, on 1 September 1983, Soviet air-defense fighters shot down a Boeing 747 over Kamchatka. Several months afterward, an Iranian A-300 passenger plane was brought down by a missile launched from a United States warship. On 28 May 1987, Mathias Rust's flight in a sports plane triggered Soviet air defense into a state of combat readiness. The event of 1989 was the overflight of a MiG-23 past half of Europe after its pilot left it by parachute owing to a breakdown. 10. Protection against the effects of various errors necessitates
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.