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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## Document 2 of 19 Page proved to be weak and ill-organized for every former member country now on its own. The maladjustment of the air-defense systems of the countries of Central Europe to the new conditions is also due to their loss of their big-power protector, the USSR, especially as regards antimissile and antispace defense. 26. The countries of Central Europe are facing the problem of radically changing the organizational structure of their own national air-defense systems. Hence, what kind of changes, and what should their nature be? And can those countries at present afford to introduce them? I believe that the nature of the changes in the air-defense systems of those countries can be grasped by means of a long-range view of the role and place of their airspaces, which will develop as part of the new relations between the Commonwealth of Independent States, especially Russia, and a united Western Europe. To both of those parties, the airspaces of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary constitute a genuine buffer zone that can equally well promote mutual security and threats. 27. It appears that Western Europe and Russia will, in that respect, make decisions advantageous to themselves first of all. Therefore, even now it is highly important to the countries of Central Europe whether the European countries accept a strong air defense of the above-mentioned buffer zone-strong enough to oppose the utilization of its airspace as a transit zone for an air strike or to respond to that strike-or whether it would be better for them for the air defense of that region to be weak, weak enough to permit the arbitrary utilization of airspace by anyone at will. Consider that by assumption that airspace seems ideally designed as a locale for an eventual gigantic air battle outside the territory of the countries engaging in that battle. Only time will answer that and other similar questions. 28. The experience at the end of this century shows that a strong and well-organized air defense is needed in the present-day world. Only such a defense can assure the proper existence of countries and serve to engage in offensive and defensive operations on land, on sea, and in the air. The role of the Polish air-defense system ensues from its geographic location and strategic conditions of military alignment. It can be thus stated that the role of air defense in the nation's defense system is determined by: the extent of danger from the air, the possibility of eliminating or reducing that danger, and the views on the means of eliminating or reducing that danger. Allowing for those determining factors, modern air defense should be characterized by: 29. -Combating enemy air strength from all threatened directions throughout the altitude range.
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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.