IN Brief:
- MBDA has opened a repair and logistics facility at Czosnów to support Poland’s PILICA+ air-defence programme.
- The centre will provide faster maintenance, technical support, and training, with UK personnel working alongside Polish counterparts.
- The facility extends a wider UK-Polish missile relationship that includes NAREW, domestic manufacturing, and more than 1,000 planned missiles.
MBDA has opened a new missile repair and logistics centre at Czosnów in Poland, moving maintenance, technical support, and training for the PILICA+ air-defence programme closer to the Polish operator while extending the industrial relationship behind the country’s expanding missile network.
The facility was opened on 7 September by UK Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard and Polish Deputy Minister of National Defence Paweł Zalewski. UK personnel will work alongside Polish counterparts at the site, which the UK Ministry of Defence says will provide faster and more direct maintenance, support, and training for PILICA+.
That changes the programme from a delivery relationship into a more substantial through-life support arrangement. Ground-based air-defence systems depend on far more than launchers and missile stocks once they enter service: radar and command equipment must remain aligned with missile configurations, operators require recurrent training, faults have to be diagnosed, and damaged or time-expired equipment needs a controlled repair route.
PILICA+ combines MBDA’s CAMM missile and launcher with Polish radar and command-and-control equipment to form a short-range air-defence layer. The programme is intended to protect Polish airspace against a range of airborne threats and forms part of a wider architecture that also includes the larger NAREW programme.
Locating support capability in Poland should reduce the need to send equipment back to the UK for routine technical work. That matters as fleets grow because maintenance turnaround can quickly become a constraint on operational availability when repair capacity sits hundreds of kilometres from the user.
The site also adds a training function. Air-defence systems are software- and electronics-intensive assets, and maintaining readiness depends on technicians understanding configuration changes, diagnostics, test equipment, and safety procedures as much as operators understanding how to engage targets. Bringing those functions into-country gives Poland more control over day-to-day availability while retaining access to MBDA engineering expertise.
The UK Ministry of Defence says more than 400 MBDA employees in Britain are working on programmes supporting Poland, with activity connected to Bristol, Stevenage, and Bolton. The Czosnów site therefore expands the company’s Polish footprint without replacing the UK engineering and manufacturing base behind the programmes.
That relationship is considerably larger than PILICA+ alone. The UK and Poland are also working on NAREW, a programme valued at more than £4 billion on the UK side and expected to deliver more than 1,000 air-defence missiles and over 100 launchers. The programme is intended to build Polish sovereign missile-manufacturing capability as well as field additional air-defence systems.
The manufacturing element gives the bilateral arrangement a different structure from a conventional export sale. Poland is not simply acquiring finished equipment and a support contract; the longer-term model involves domestic production, integration, maintenance, and technical capability around systems developed with MBDA.
That approach has become increasingly important as European countries expand missile inventories. A larger fleet can be purchased relatively quickly if production capacity exists, but readiness over a 20- or 30-year service life depends on a much broader industrial base. Storage, inspection, repair, software configuration, training, test equipment, and component replacement all have to scale with the number of operational batteries.
Missile sustainment also presents particular challenges because the interceptor itself cannot simply be treated as a sealed item until it is fired. Electronics, energetic materials, seals, batteries, and other components are subject to inspection and life-management requirements, while launchers and associated equipment must remain compatible as hardware and software evolve.
The Czosnów centre therefore provides infrastructure for a phase of the programme that is less visible than contract signature or missile delivery but more persistent. Local access to repair and technical support can reduce equipment downtime, while training capacity should allow Polish units to develop their own technical depth as the fleet expands.
The opening follows the UK-Poland Security and Defence Partnership Treaty signed in May, which broadened cooperation across defence, security, and economic resilience. Missile programmes sit alongside other joint activity including Poland’s MIECZNIK frigates, giving the two countries several long-term industrial programmes rather than a single procurement relationship.
For MBDA, Poland has consequently become both a customer and an increasingly important industrial partner. For Warsaw, the value of that relationship will be measured not only in launcher and missile numbers but in how much engineering, production, and sustainment capacity can be maintained locally.
The Czosnów centre is modest beside the value of the programmes it supports, but its purpose goes directly to operational availability. Buying air-defence systems establishes nominal capacity; having the technicians, spares, test equipment, and repair infrastructure to return them to service determines how much of that capacity remains usable.
