POLAND TO BUILD VAST NEW DEFENCE LINE

Poland is about to spend $2.55 billion on a border defence system the likes of which Europe hasn’t seen since the ill fated Maginot Line.
I’m not convinced this is any more sensible than that vast scheme.
The French, having suffered massive manpower losses in the First World War, decided to build at huge expense, under the tutelage of Georges Maginot its then War Minister, a line of massive concrete walls and underground defences, with hundreds of artillery emplacements, barracks, an underground railway and air conditioning with gas resistant seals.
It ran from the Swiss border to the border with Luxembourg. The plan was to take it to the English Channel but it proved too expensive. The fate of it was humiliating - the Germans went around it in 1940, cutting through the ’impossible’ Ardennes forest and defeating France in six weeks. You can visit the wall at a couple of sites and go inside - it’s awesome.
So with that behind us and then the war in Ukraine, which has become almost what France actually expected a war with Germany to look like (minus the drones and missiles), back in the 1930’s, I can’t but help feel this is misguided. Rarely does the next war look like the last one.
However, the plan is going ahead. From Poland’s border with the Russian Kaliningrad exclave, crossing the border with Lithuania and the infamous Sulwaki salient, down the entire border with Belarus, a huge set of defences from anti-tank and vehicle obstacles, trenches, fortified bunkers to command sites is being built.
Positions with pre-stocked bunkers, anti drone warfare jamming systems, long range optical and infrared scanners, fences and minefields will be installed along the whole length of it.
To add to this Poland has ordered Swedish AEW aircraft, and four American built Aerostat systems.
These are basically static helium airships with a radar, tethered to the ground that float 4km up in the air, giving them a range of 300km to spot incoming aircraft and missiles.
Not only is this to cover defences in the traditional sense. The whole border area is to get reinforced bridges, strengthened river banks, reinforced roads, all to ensure defence forces can rapidly move from rear areas to forward ones to engage the enemy.
The scheme is truly vast. It’s also part of a plan to stop Belarus and Russia from forcing migrants they let in, just to force them over the border into the EU, a growing problem, that’s almost permanent now and worsens in the summer months. In fact it’s gotten so bad already this year, Poland has had to deploy regular army units to stop migrants from Africa - the Russians and Belarus give transit visas out to Eritreans, Sudanese and may others to get to the EU, knowing migration stirs the political right wing parties in the west.
So is this vast border defence sensible? It’s mostly about being a deterrent. Making it incredibly hard for Russia to attack without immense difficulty. Yet it also has weak spots -
there’s no plan to bring it down the Ukrainian border - what if the Russians in some unforeseen future scenario, went around it?
Poland’s paranoia over Russia is, in my view, at any other time, excessive; but not now, it’s simply being prudent. Right now I wish Britain would display some of that paranoia. Poland conducted war games some four years ago, running seven simulations of a Russian attack. The orcs arrived in Warsaw in three weeks. Not once, but every time.
Poland is largely flat and open terrain, part of the great North European Plain that extends from Holland over north Germany, Poland to the Ural mountains.
Poland was occupied by the Soviets and hasn’t forgotten what Russia did in 1939, splitting the country in two with the Nazis, then letting it be destroyed in 1944 as Warsaw was raised to the ground. They have every reason to be paranoid and all the evidence they have backs it up.
Is this the right choice? A super high tech defence line for the 21st Century?
Again remember it’s a deterrent with a purpose if deterrence fails.