Two years ago, a cornfield grew along the Vistula north of Warsaw. Now armored launchers roll out of a weapons plant where MBDA built a missile facility in the time it takes other countries to form a committee. Polish workers punch in at dawn to build what the alliance needs. The question isn’t whether they can do the work. The question is whether the money reaches them, or whether it passes through on its way to the people who already have enough.
Poland has driven defense spending to 4.8 percent of GDP, more than doubling it since Russia invaded Ukraine. Warsaw secured €44 billion in European Union defense loans, the largest single disbursement in the program, and pledged to direct nearly 90 percent of it into domestic industry. Production of 155mm artillery ammunition is scaling from 30,000 rounds this year toward 200,000 annually within two years, with three new munitions factories planned by 2028.
Those are real jobs. At MBDA’s new facility at Czosnów, the managing director, Jim Price, a former Royal Marine, said the company had to build its Polish subsidiary from scratch to keep pace with demand. “Everyone has had to move twice as fast to meet the Polish needs,” he said. At Babcock’s shipyard in Gdynia on the Baltic coast, crews are building Miecznik frigates under the swordfish program. BAE Systems is partnering with the state-owned PGZ’s subsidiary Mesko, which makes ammunition and rockets, on an artillery plant near Katowice. At a counter-drone shop in southern Poland, Advanced Protection Systems has nearly doubled its workforce this year.
Polish hands are building these things. The question is what those hands take home.
Poland’s projected deficit next year is 7.1 percent of GDP, the largest in the European Union. Last week the rating agency Moody’s downgraded the country’s credit rating to its lowest level since 2002. Leszek Kąsek, an economist at ING Bank in Warsaw, put it plainly: “This path is not sustainable.”
Who pays when the path stops being sustainable? Teachers. Nurses. The people who ride the bus to work and the people who teach their kids. The woman in Skarżysko-Kamienna whose grandmother worked in the old arms factory and whose daughter might work in the new one. The 7.1 percent deficit does not float in the air. It lands on households, on public services, on the parts of the budget that keep a country livable for people who are not building missiles.
The Safe loan money is supposed to fix that. Nearly 90 percent pledged to domestic industry. Polish factories, Polish workers, Polish jobs. That is the promise.
The IMF warned in March that the economic benefits of European defense investment “would not necessarily flow for the governments taking out their chequebooks.” That sentence is worth reading again. The loan comes off the EU’s books and onto Poland’s. The contractors who build the plants, supply the systems and sign the equipment deals collect at market rates. BAE Systems does not offer a discount because the borrower is a frontline state. MBDA does not reduce its margin because the money came as a loan, not a grant. The Patriot missiles, the Abrams tanks, the F-35 jets: American arms manufacturers are ringing up sales across the board. The tills are ringing, as the Financial Times put it, but not all of those tills are in Poland.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-five years later, the complex runs on euro-denominated loans routed through EU programs and collected at market rates by multinational defense contractors. The principle is the same. The money moves from public borrowing toward private profit, and the people who borrow it are not the people who keep it.
The 90 percent domestic pledge sounds strong. The question is what counts as domestic. A Polish subsidiary of a British defense group building ships at a Polish yard with Polish workers, those are Polish jobs. The Patriot battery purchased from an American prime contractor, that is a transfer of Polish borrowing capacity to a Raytheon or Lockheed Martin balance sheet. The line between industrial policy and procurement depends on where the money stops moving and the value stays. Right now, some of it stops at Polish factory floors and some of it keeps going.
The European capitals that should be carrying this weight are not. Germany, France and Britain have dragged their feet on defense spending for years while Russia sat on NATO’s eastern border. Berlin is still commissioning committees. Paris has its own priorities. London settled on 2.7 percent by 2030, as if the threat respects Whitehall’s budget calendar. That under-spending has been subsidized by Polish workers and Polish taxpayers since 2022. Poland built what the alliance needed because the alliance would not build it. Now Moody’s punishes Poland for the bill.
Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki framed the arms buildup as both security and economic strategy. “The only thing which Putin understands is solidarity and power,” he said. The solidarity is real. The economic strategy depends on whether the euros reach Polish neighborhoods or leak out through contractor margins and equipment purchases. Right now it is doing both. The factory jobs are real. The deficit that funds them is also real. Moody’s is not wrong that the fiscal path needs adjustment. Moody’s is wrong about what needs adjusting. The answer is not less defense investment. It is more of the money reaching the people doing the work, and less of it leaving through the procurement side door.
Poland’s living standards rose from 40 percent of the EU average in the mid-1990s to 81 percent last year. Annual output passed $1 trillion in 2025. The economy grew at 3.9 percent annualized in the second quarter, even with the headwinds from the Iran war. None of that happened by balancing the budget into irrelevance. It happened because Warsaw chose to invest: first in roads and railways with European catch-up funds, and now in defense plants and ammunition lines.
Polish workers proved they could build a modern economy inside a generation. The test now is whether they keep what they build. When the 200,000 rounds roll off the line, the contract should pay the workers who made them and the communities where they live. When the €44 billion comes through, it should reach the neighborhoods where the factories stand, not just the contractors who built them. And when Moody’s demands austerity, the people of Poland should ask Moody’s who, exactly, it thinks should go without.