Sławomir Mentzen, the Polish presidential candidate of the right-wing Confederation party, has claimed that if war broke out Poland would only have enough ammunition for three days of fighting.
His claim was supported by Polish journalists specialising in defence issues.
Mentzen’s comments, made at a campaign rally on March 2, were given as evidence that the government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk was failing in its quest for national security. He said the country was unprepared for military conflict despite it now spending more of its GDP on defence – 4.3 per cent – than any other European Union member state.
“We have ammunition supplies for only three days of war,” Mentzen declared during the rally. He did not cite sources for his claim but they were borne out by calculations made by defence correspondents in the Polish media.
Support for Mentzen in opinion polls has been on an upward curve and some polls showed him challenging Karol Nawrocki from the Conservatives (PiS) for second place. The frontrunner remains Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, who was supported by Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO).
According to the Rzeczpospolita daily defence correspondent Maciej Miłosz: “Polish ammunition reserves would only last for two or three days of military action”. He said there was not enough action being taken by the government or the Polish arms industry to tackle the issue.
Speaking on talk radio TokFM on February 20, Miłosz said: “It has been three years since the outbreak of war in Ukraine yet the Polish arms consortium PGZ has failed to achieve a significant increase in the production of ammunition.”
According to his estimates, which the government will not confirm as data on ammunition reserves is classified, Poland’s current level of production of ammunition is 30,000 shells a year, enough for no more than three days of armed conflict.
Zbigniew Parafianowicz of the daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, said that was well short of the target of 280,000 rounds of 155mm calibre ammunition. That was the target Poland’s arms industry had set itself and well below the 1.1 million target of Germany.
Russia was said to be already producing more than million shells a year and Poland was still three years away from having its own nitrocellulose production capacity, used in explosives among other things.
In November 2024, Poland’s parliament voted to allocate €700 million for investments in ramping up the country’s ammunition production capacities, with a particular focus on much-needed 155mm artillery shells.
The funds are to be made available for investments by companies that sought the state’s backing for their projects to ramp up ammunition manufacturing capabilities. Currently, those were heavily dependent on manufacturing technology from foreign partners such as Slovakia.
