Poland Launches New Tender for 14 Army Helicopters

After having ordered and then canceled Airbus Caracal helicopters, then announced and denied an order for Black Hawks, Poland’ s MoD has now announced a new tender for 14 army helicopters to begin to replace its venerable Mi-17s and Sokol W-3s. (RBS photo)

WARSAW --- Poland has launched a tender to buy 14 helicopters as part of an urgent operational need of the armed forces, the defence ministry said in a statement on Thursday without elaborating.

The ministry said NATO member Poland would spend all the funds allocated in the state budget this year to modernise its armed forces, despite having cancelled a preliminary deal to buy 50 Caracal helicopters from France's Airbus.

Critics said cancelling the 13.5 billion zloty ($3.4 billion) Airbus deal would mean Poland could fail to spend all the funds earmarked for army modernisation and fall short of the NATO target of spending at least 2 percent of output on defence.

"The Ministry of Defence plans to spend over 61 billion zlotys on the programme of technical modernisation (of the armed forces) in the years 2017-2022," the ministry said in its statement on Thursday. (end of excerpt)

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