Poland Is About to Upgrade to the F-35 Fighter Jet

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

32nd Tactical Air Base in Łask, Poland — This is a big week for this air base in central Poland, as “very soon” the first Lockheed Martin F-35A fighter jets — touted as “the most advanced fighter jets in the world” — are expected to arrive.

 

Up until now, this base, a critical hub for NATO’s eastern flank, was home to sixteen F-16 Fighting Falcons. While the F-16 was designed in the 1970s, today’s models are nothing to sneeze at. The F-16 has a top speed of Mach 2, it’s considered one of the most agile dogfighters ever built, and it can carry weapons at eleven different “hardpoints.”

 

One of the few drawbacks is that those weapons or extra fuel tanks on the hardpoints make the F-16 easier for enemy radar systems to spot. The F-35 is actually slightly slower, with a top speed of Mach 1.6 — that’s still 1,200 miles per hour — but the F-35’s much more advanced avionics and sensors spot the enemy much faster. As a result, the F-35 doesn’t actually need to do as much dogfighting; it wins the fight before the enemy fighter craft can even get the F-35 within the range of its weapons. The F-35 is also stealthy — a very low radar cross-section thanks to its airframe shape, internal weapons bays, and radar-absorbent materials — making it far harder to detect and track.

 

The new F-35s are so stealthy that the Polish Air Force actually changed its logo from its traditional red and white checkerboard to a light and dark grey one.

 

Over at War on the Rocks, Army Major General (ret.) John G. Ferrari and Dillon Prochnicki of the American Enterprise Institute evaluate the F-35’s performance in combat over Iran and conclude that it is “a masterpiece built for the wrong war.”:

 

The F-35 Lightning II has performed brilliantly in the Iran war. Stealth aircraft penetrated defended airspace, suppressed and destroyed air defenses, struck missile infrastructure, and enabled follow-on operations by legacy platforms such as heavy bombers. The jet’s sensor fusion gave commanders an integrated picture of the battlefield that proved as decisive as the weapons themselves. The F-35 demonstrated exactly what it was built to do: penetrate contested airspace, use its sensors to find and track targets inside an integrated air defense system, share that information across the force, and deliver precision strikes against high-value targets. None of that is in dispute.

 

Ferrari and Prochnicki’s objections focus primarily on how the F-35 would fare in a war against China, and question whether the F-35s are too expensive and take too long to build.

 

You don’t hear as much talk about the Russian Air Force’s MiG-29s these days. This is partially because, thanks to the Ukrainians, there are fewer MiG-29s around than there used to be, and partially because of the ascending era of drone warfare. (In March, Ukraine outpaced Russia in in the number of deep strikes against enemy territory. They appear to be doing it entirely with drones; if the Ukrainians have run any manned aircraft combat operations in Russian airspace, they’ve kept it very quiet.)

 

At the 32nd Tactical Air Base, I asked one Polish Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Colonel David Kij, to compare the difference between flying an F-16 to flying an F-35 in terms of cars. He told me that flying an F-16 is like driving a Lamborghini from three decades ago, while flying an F-35 is like driving a Lamborghini from today — both state-of-the-art for their respective time periods, but the modern one is, literally, a generation ahead. He said that if you know how to fly an F-16, then you’re not starting from zero in learning how to fly an F-35, but the jets are significantly different and require years of updated training.

 

A Polish F-16 Fighting Falcon in a hangar at the 32nd Tactical Air Base in Łask, Poland. (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Most of the pilots at this air base have one-word English call signs; one of the pilots joked, “We work with other nations, we don’t want it to be impossible to pronounce.” They asked us not to identify the call signs of the Polish pilots, but some of them were odd, and Kij told us, “If he did stupid things during training, he gets a stupid call sign.”

 

Yesterday’s edition of this newsletter mentioned how in September, Russia “accidentally” flew 19 drones into Polish airspace. Jets from this air base, as well as other NATO countries, scrambled to intercept the Russian incursion. At least three and maybe a fourth drone were shot down, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk invoked NATO’s Article Four, which basically calls a NATO meeting for consultations.

 

Krzysztof Duda, the commander of the 32nd Tactical Air Base in Łask and an F-16 pilot, said that the September incursion was “very fruitful, with many lessons learned from that.” I asked if he could elaborate, and he said that most of the information regarding those learned lessons was “sensitive,” but that the experience was definitely influencing the Polish Air Force’s acquisitions.

 

Since 2012, the 32nd Tactical Air Base has been a permanent home to a U.S. Air Force aviation detachment. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Peter Namyslowski — born in America to Polish immigrant parents — told us that the base is often used for “Dissimilar Aircraft Combat Training,” and that the presence of the F-35s would offer “a new buffet table of options” for that training, including the remaining Polish MiG-29s. (Poland recently agreed to trade nine of its aging MiG-29s to the Ukrainians in exchange for some unspecified access to Ukrainian drone technology.)

 

The logo of the U.S. Air Force’s 52nd Operations Group, Detachment 1. The slogan at the bottom says “Razem Silniejsi,” meaning, “Stronger Together.” (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Back in 2020, the Polish Defense Ministry signed a contract worth $4.6 billion under which the country will acquire 32 F-35 jets.

 

“The foreign military sales portfolio is incredible,” Namyslowski told us. “F-16s and C-130s were something that we talked about 15, 16 years ago; now we’re talking about F-35s, Abrams tanks, Apache helicopters, Blackhawks, Patriot batteries. The list is unending; the appetite is insatiable. What does that mean for us? It goes to the discussion of fair burden sharing. And I think Poland is leading the way in taking that on, and is an incredible partner in that respect.”

 

According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Poland’s total volume of arms imports in 2021-2025 was 852 percent higher than in the previous five-year period. Forty-four percent of those imported weapon purchases were from manufacturers in the United States. All told, since 2022, Poland has purchased $60 billion in U.S. weapons, according to Paweł Zalewski, the secretary of state within Poland’s Ministry of Defense.

 

In light of all this . . . why would the Trump administration screw over Poland with a last-minute cancellation of a rotation of troops, a move that even congressional Republicans find baffling and infuriating, and that apparently even Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and acting Army Chief of Staff General Christopher LaNeve can’t explain?