May 20, 2025: Since Russia invaded Ukraine Poland has increased its defense spending to $28 Billion as of 2024. That’s less than half the $65 billion Ukraine spent. For Ukraine that was 34 percent of GDP. That’s a third of the national budget spent on defending the nation against the invading Russians.

At the same time Poland the 2024 Polish army had 208,000 soldiers. That means Poland has the third largest military force in NATO. Poland will continue expanding its armed forces until it has half a million troops. Poland is also training every military age man to serve in the army or, for most of them, the reserves. This year Poland is spending 4.7 percent of GDP on defense. This is the highest for European NATO members.

The situation has changed dramatically in the last four years. In 2021 Poland announced it was increasing the size of its military to 300,000 troops. In 2021 they had 110,000 troops in the land forces. The land forces consisted of four divisions and five independent brigades, plus support units and 30,000 Territorial Defense Force/TDF troops. The expansion increased the overall force to 250,000 regular troops and 50,000 TDF. At the time conscription was ruled out while there was an increase in the length of service for new volunteers. In 2021 Poland spent 2.2 percent of GDP on defense. That was on a defense budget of $13.1 billion a year.

In 2021 the goal for NATO nations was two percent of GDP but only a few reached or exceeded that. The United States spent 3.7 percent, Britain 2.2 percent and France 2.1 percent. Russia spent 4.3 percent. Global defense spending was about two trillion dollars and 2.4 percent of global GDP. U.S. spending accounts for 39 percent of that, which is equal to the next fourteen nations combined.

Polish defense spending increased enormously since it joined NATO in 1999, when it was spending $3.2 billion a year. To be a NATO member they had to bring all their military equipment up to NATO standards. While some of the Cold War era Russian equipment qualified, or could do so with some modifications, Poland wanted to replace most of the Cold War gear with modern Western weapons and equipment. Fortunately for Poland and other East European nations that joined NATO after 1991, the Cold War era NATO nations were reducing the size and equipment holdings of their armed forces. This made available a lot of modern NATO weapons to the new members at very low cost or for free. Poland was able to upgrade its forces with German and American tanks while also buying F-35 fighters, HIMARS guided rockets, more effective electronics and modern military logistical equipment. Poland was a major manufacturer of ships, aircraft, and military vehicles while part of the Cold War Russian Warsaw Pact that dissolved in 1991 as the Soviet Union disintegrated. Poland was soon producing NATO standard ships, aircraft, vehicles, and all manner of modern weapons. For that reason, most of the cost for expanding the military was spent in Poland and that made it possible to complete the expansion before 2029.

Poland has already been expanding the size of the military, which was previously expected to reach 169,000 by 2022 as the new TDF reached its full strength of 35,000 volunteers. The TDF was established in 2016 in response to the 2014 Russian attack on Ukraine and increased aggression towards East European NATO members. TDF is like the American Active Reserve, which also requires volunteers to devote 30 days a year to active duty for training. Similar TDFs were created in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as part of an effort by the only NATO nations to border Russia, to have a rapidly mobilized reserve force that can handle rear-area security while the regular army troops deal with stopping a Russian offensive. The Polish TDF had a brigade for each of the 16 provinces plus one for the capital Warsaw. Each brigade has from one to five infantry battalions consisting of personnel living in that province. While Russia remains a threat, there will be no shortage of volunteers and that means the most capable volunteers are selected. Similar territorial forces are being formed throughout Eastern Europe but Poland and the Baltic States face the most immediate threat if Russia attacks one or more of them. By 2025 Poland was providing military training for every military-age Polish male. Few eligible men avoided the training.

After 2014 many East European nations feared Russia had gone from former occupier to a current threat. Every nation in Eastern Europe decided to speed upgrades to their armed forces, as quickly as limited budgets allowed. For example, in 2015 Lithuania increased the 2016 defense budget by 35 percent. This made defense spending 1.48 percent of GDP. All this is eerily like what happened after World War I when France and Britain tried to help protect newly created, from the wreckage of the Russian and Austrian empires, countries like Poland and the Baltic States with cheap World War I surplus weapons and promises of aid if Russia should seek to rebuild its fractured empire. The Russians did, and now that bit of history seems to be repeating itself. The newly liberated nations of East Europe are seeking some new solutions to avoid repeating old history.

In 2016 Poland and the Baltic States also asked for some American troops. Not enough to halt a Russian invasion, just enough to ensure that the Americans and their NATO allies, or at least some of them, would intervene if Russia did attack. These four nations already have a mutual defense guarantee from NATO in the form of NATO membership. But that is not enough and what has been asked for, and granted, are some American troops in each of these nations. The response is an offer to send one reinforced battalion per country. That means about 4,000 troops overall.

These four East European countries joined a growing list of nations threatened by dangerous neighbors, agreed, and often asked, to host American troops. The first and most obvious examples of this are South Korea, Japan, and Germany. This form of defense has been quietly followed by several nations in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. All these Persian Gulf nations want the Americans around to keep the Iranians out. But it is not just the Iranians. Inside Iraq there have been American troops in northern Iraq since the early 1990s, to protect the autonomous Kurdish majority up there from the Arab majority. This form of security is also called a tripwire force because if the host nation is attacked the presence of some U.S. troops means that a lot of U.S. reinforcements will promptly arrive. Several other nations are seeking this form of security guarantee but are not getting it, at least not yet. This included Ukraine and Georgia. The United States is the favored source of these armed hostages because the U.S. is a superpower and, compared to all the alternatives, the least likely to take advantage of the situation.

In 2025 a new government in the United States announced less support for NATO and east European countries. In part, this was meant to force European nations to do more in providing for their own defense and expanding the size of European defense industries. Poland didn’t wait for that, spending over ten billion dollars on tanks, mobile artillery and missiles from South Korea. Poland was demonstrating that they will always find a way to defend themselves from Russian aggression.