TSAMTO, May 27. On May 26, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced on his Twitter page that he had signed a letter of request (LoR) for the purchase of about 500 MLRS M-142 HIMARS launchers for the Polish Armed Forces in the United States.
MLRS are purchased under the Homar program.
As stated, the equipment should enter service with 80 batteries of rocket artillery. It is planned that a significant part of the production will be concentrated in Poland.
According to a number of Polish commentators, the purchase of such a number of M-142 is carried out completely without taking into account the development plans of the Polish Armed Forces and without taking into account the financial realities of the Ministry of Defense. It is also difficult to guess which departments the purchased systems will be delivered to. The scale of the project assumes the presence in the Armed Forces of more than 25 divisions of 18 MLRS in each or 20 divisions of 24 PU in each. So far, the needs of the Polish Armed Forces were the supply of equipment for 4 divisions (one in each artillery regiment).
In turn, the representative of the Armaments Agency of the Ministry of National Defense, Lieutenant Colonel Krzysztof Platek, said that the acquisition of MLRS will be based on production cooperation. The level of "polonization" of the installations will be maximum, which provides for the use of the Polish Topaz fire control system and the chassis of national production. There are also plans to acquire technology for the production of jet ammunition (probably controlled by the GMLRS family of RS).
The experience of combat operations on the territory of Ukraine indicates that it will be necessary to create a sufficiently large supply of ammunition for the use of MLRS. According to Polish experts, the need for the M-142 will exceed 10 thousand RS, which will lead to serious costs. Recruitment and training of personnel for the use of MLRS may also require time and money.
It is assumed that the ordered systems will join 20 M-142 HIMARS launchers purchased by the Polish Ministry of National Defense in the American configuration in 2019.
