Poland has over 172,000 armed troops MoD says
Poland has over 172,000 soldiers under arms, 77,000 more than it had seven years ago, the Polish Defence Ministry has said.
The ministry released the figures in response to the former defence minister, who accused the incumbent government of "juggling statistics."
The Polish government has made increasing the size of Poland's armed forces a priority owing to the war in Ukraine.
"The facts are that we currently have over 172,000 armed soldiers. In 2015, there were only 95,000," the ministry wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
The post was accompanied by a graph with the figure 172,500 as the number of troops as of May 26, 2023, in an apparent reaction to a statement by Tomasz Siemoniak, a defence minister in the centrist Civic Platform government, which ruled in coalition with the Polish People's Party from 2007 to 2015.
Commenting on an article published in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Siemoniak said that Poland's defence ministry "achieves such successes that it must keep them secret."
"A record number of professional soldiers leaving and data juggling. Tweaking statistics to hide a staffing crisis. Now you hear about enrolling civilian workers into the army. They do the same as they did before, but thanks to this the army grows. On paper," he added.
Rzeczpospolita reported that the defence ministry withheld from the Supreme Audit Office (NIK) some data about the size of the Polish Army in 2022.
"The Supreme Audit Office points out that the Ministry of National Defence has classified some statistical data on the number of Polish Army soldiers," the newspaper wrote.
"Opposition politicians believe this is hiding data from the public," it added.
According to Rzeczpospolita, "due to the 'classified' clause being assigned to some data, in the implementation of the 2022 budget there is no information... on the average annual employment and... the average basic salary of professional soldiers... the number of soldiers dismissed from service, the number of recruited professional soldiers, and the number of professional soldiers with retirement rights."
The daily added that NIK "highlighted that the classified information as regards the number of soldiers drafted in 2022 (13,742) and the number of professional soldiers released from service (8,988) was shared by the head of the Ministry of National Defence on Twitter".
According to Wojciech Skurkiewicz, a deputy defence minister, the general number of the Polish troops is public, and the personnel numbers in individual corps and types of armed forces were considered sensitive data.
According to NIK, the number of full-time jobs in the Polish Army has reached nearly 159,000, not counting Military Intelligence Service personnel. This figure includes 118,000 professional soldiers and the almost 32,000-strong voluntary personnel of the Territorial Defence Force (WOT) in addition to 16,000 people trained as part of voluntary military service. (PAP)
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