Wednesday 16 July 2008

RUSI interview with Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces

This is a brief review of the points highlighted by the Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces, General Gagor, in an interview with RUSI, which opswarfare highlighted in an earlier post. General Gagor mentioned the following points
  • Interoperability
  • CIMIC
  • C4ISR
  • Deployability
  • Sustainment
  • HUMINT
  • PSYOPS
  • Military Police
  • MEDEVAC
  • Force protection
  • Night operations
  • Special Operations Forces Command
  • UAV
  • helping the consolidation and privatisation of defence companies
  • offset agreements in procurement
opswarfare would like to elaborate on some of the points raised by General Gagor.

Sustainment is an often neglected portion of operations planning, perhaps because warfare is sometimes assumed to be something that will end quickly. Well, peacekeeping operations are one type of operation where sustainment (specifically, the logistics portion) is key.

Force protection is another area worth a little more attention. It's difficult to separate forces into front-line units and rear echelon units nowadays, and rear echelon units (e.g. medical, transport, workshop, HQ, supply, etc) need to brush up on their basic soldering skills.

Night operations can still be tricky for many modern armies to conduct effectively. This needs to be addressed on the ground, e.g. issuing NVGs to every soldier, regular training missions at night, preferably under less than ideal conditions (e.g. during moonless nights).

Some of the targets that Poland is looking at
  • increase the deployability ratio of land forces from approximately 30% at present to over 50% in 2012.
  • Full professionalisation of armed forces
  • NATO Force Goals
  • Prague Capability Commitments (PCC)
And finally, a quote explaining the reasons why Poland gave up National Service
As a result of the continuous process of modernisation, our forces are equipped with modern weapon systems, including an increasing number of electronic devices, which require a high standard of education and training. This is one of the arguments that persuaded us to give up the nine-month national service. The majority of modern militaries have done the same.

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