A radar contact approaching from the direction of Belarus was enough to trigger a Polish military verification operation on 6 September. The Operational Command of the Armed Forces said it was checking a possible airspace violation, sent a military helicopter to the area and temporarily restricted some civilian air traffic so the military could work without interference.
The conclusion was mundane but operationally important: there had been no violation. The radar returns were caused by a large flock of birds, and the command said there was no threat to the security of Polish airspace.
That did not end the argument. Retired general Roman Polko, a former commander of Poland’s GROM special forces unit, told Fakt that mistaking the birds for a possible threat was a “failure”. He used the episode to call for faster replacement of older detection systems and for frontline air-defence personnel to have better reconnaissance tools and quicker authority to act when a target is genuinely dangerous.
The military’s explanation points to the central difficulty. Lt Col Jacek Goryszewski of the Operational Command said a radar display is not a film image of an aircraft or missile. Operators see returns and movement parameters. Those signals have to be interpreted and, when necessary, checked by other assets before a firm identification can be made.
Former Air Force inspector Brig Gen Tomasz Drewniak offered a different emphasis. Large birds and some unmanned aircraft can have similar size and speed profiles, he said. If radar systems are configured to catch more small or low-signature objects, fewer returns are filtered out. The result is greater sensitivity but also more contacts that must be investigated.
Drewniak’s operational preference is clear: a false alarm is less dangerous than a missed hostile object. In an environment shaped by drones, cruise missiles and repeated alerts, that trade-off is becoming a structural feature of air defence rather than an occasional nuisance.
Poland has recent reasons to favour sensitivity. On 30 July, during a Russian attack on western Ukraine, a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile violated Polish airspace and fell near Tarnawa-Kolonia in Lublin province. No one was injured, but the incident forced the government, military and local authorities to explain how detection, interception and public warning had worked. Polish officials said NATO allies were kept informed.
The September contact was different in several important ways. The Operational Command said that, during the verification, it had not observed Russian long-range aviation activity linked to strikes on Ukraine. The contact was ultimately biological, not military. Yet the sequence still shows how Poland’s air-defence network now has to process ambiguous signals against a background of real cross-border risk.
NATO describes its Integrated Air and Missile Defence as a permanent architecture that combines national and Alliance resources under a common command-and-control framework. Air policing, surveillance radars, surface-based air defence and other capabilities contribute to the wider picture, and the Alliance has reinforced that structure on the eastern flank as airspace violations by Russian drones and aircraft have increased.
That makes Poland’s identification problem more than a local equipment issue. The more aggressively sensors search for small threats, the more the system needs reliable classification and rapid information-sharing so that operators are not overwhelmed by noise. NATO itself has made sensors and command-and-control capabilities a priority in its current air-defence initiatives.
Polko’s criticism and Drewniak’s defence of caution are therefore not mutually exclusive. One is arguing for better discrimination and shorter decision chains; the other is warning against using false positives as a reason to reduce sensitivity. A credible system has to do both: detect enough to avoid being surprised and classify fast enough to avoid wasting scarce aircraft and attention.
The flock of birds did not breach Polish airspace. What it did reveal is the pressure on a network that must decide quickly whether an ambiguous dot is harmless, hostile or simply not yet understood. The next test will come without warning, and it may not end with birds.