Signal No. 121 · An Apache Depot Dated 2036

Offset implementing agreements between the Boeing Company and two Polish state entities — Wojskowe Zakłady Lotnicze Nr 1 (WZL-1), the military aircraft works in Łódź, and Wojskowe Centralne Biuro Konstrukcyjno-Technologiczne (WCBKT), the central military design and technology bureau — were signed at the Łódź plant on Tuesday, with Prime Minister Donald Tusk present and the defence ministry represented by state secretaries Cezary Tomczyk and Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka. What they establish is an authorised service centre for the AH-64E Apache Guardian: organisational and intermediate-level maintenance, repair and overhaul, plus depot-level repair of selected components. Servicing of the fourth-generation TADS/PNVS target-acquisition and pilot night-vision sights and of the LONGBOW fire-control radar comes through a separate Lockheed Martin agreement signed in March, which the defence ministry described as formally opening the technology-implementation process at the plant. Turbine work — the T700-701D and the CT7 variants — is to go to WZL-1's branch at Dęblin under a third agreement, with General Electric Aerospace, which reporting on Tuesday placed as not yet concluded. Technicians are to be trained at the Military University of Technology in Warsaw. Tusk said the work would double the plant's workforce; Sobkowiak-Czarnecka framed it as the end of the period "when Poland was only a client."

The figures set the scale. Rzeczpospolita puts the Boeing agreement at about PLN 440 million and the Lockheed Martin one at over PLN 300 million — roughly PLN 740 million between the two that are concluded. The outstanding General Electric agreement, at about PLN 500 million, would take the Apache offset package to some PLN 1.2 billion. The purchase it attaches to is 96 AH-64E, signed as a Foreign Military Sales Letter of Offer and Acceptance in August 2024 and valued, with training, support and munitions, at around USD 10 billion. The obligation to establish the authorised centre in Łódź runs through the end of 2036, on the same reporting; the helicopters themselves begin arriving in 2028, per the prime minister's office. The centre is stated as able to take at least the 96 Polish aircraft and to work for other NATO Apache operators. Tomczyk said the contracts guarantee work "for decades in Łódź and Dęblin."

Iryna Terekh, chief executive of Ukraine's Fire Point, told Handelsblatt in an interview published on Tuesday that Freyja — the anti-ballistic interceptor carrying the company designation FP-7X — should reach a minimum viable product by the middle of 2027, with series production starting at the end of that year. Ten European governments and 13 European companies are now in the project. In series, she said, a round will cost under EUR 1 million, and Fire Point plans at least 2,000 in the first year; Raytheon and Lockheed Martin together build roughly 600 Patriot interceptors a year. Terekh's performance claim is the manufacturer's own: she expects the system "to be just as effective as Patriot," with an interception rate in the 25 to 50 per cent band she attributes to the Patriot, and at least two interceptors are normally fired at one ballistic missile.

When Signal No. 110 carried this file on 27 July, Davyd Aloian of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council put the minimum viable product in the first half of 2027, while Terekh had told Janes on 14 July that the first ballistic interception test was planned for around July 2027 — after the company said in June that it expected its first interceptors by the end of 2026. Mid-2027 for the product and end-2027 for mass production extends the same drift, and would leave roughly two quarters between the planned first interception attempt and the start of series production. Terekh's own picture of the design is a kitchen: some ingredients ready, others still in the fields. "The tomatoes are still green."

Two industrial facts moved with the dates. Diehl Defence, the maker of the IRIS-T air-defence family, is in negotiation to supply Freyja's seeker, and those talks are open; Leonardo, Thales and Saab are among the partners. Terekh named the qualification herself: "The challenge is that none of the partners has experience with anti-ballistic missiles. This is the crème de la crème of the European defence industry, but we are all doing this for the first time." Fire Point runs 90 sites inside Ukraine so that a strike cannot halt production, and rejects manufacturing abroad because European export rules would complicate shipping the product back to Ukraine: "European bureaucracy worries us more than the Russians." The company's two offensive ballistic weapons carry nearer dates — the 200-kilometre FP-7 expected to be cleared for use by the Ukrainian government by the end of August, the 850-kilometre FP-9 as a minimum viable product by the end of November.

Bastian Ernst, the CDU Bundestag member who has led the Reservistenverband (reservists' association) since April, told Handelsblatt that the Bundeswehr stands at roughly 185,000 active personnel and about 60,000 reservists holding an assigned post, against statutory targets of 200,000 reservists by 2033 and 260,000 active soldiers by 2035. The year-end corridor is 186,000 to 190,000 active and 70,000 to 80,000 reservists. Ernst expects this year's marks to be reached "also because the bar is not set particularly high," and then: "But I believe that next year, or at the latest the year after, we will not manage it." Missing a corridor is what allows the Bundestag to activate the Bedarfswehrpflicht — conscription triggered by need — under the military service law in force since January.

The ministry began writing in July to former professional and fixed-term soldiers with at least two years' service; men who did compulsory service before 2011 or voluntary service after it are outside both that mailing and the new compulsion. The Reservestärkungsgesetz, the reserve-strengthening bill, cleared cabinet in early July and still requires parliament. It would let reservists be called to exercises against their own and their employers' wishes, raise the exercise age ceiling from 65 to 68, and give employers eight weeks' notice. Ernst's account of what actually blocks the build-up is materiel and administration: units "borrow rifles, vehicles and other equipment from active formations in order to be able to exercise at all," and would-be reservists "often still run into a closed door" when they volunteer, waiting for an answer or getting none.

Moldova's defence ministry said on Tuesday morning that National Army radars had detected an aircraft entering national airspace near Priozerne, in the Slobozia district, at 23:41 the previous evening, during Russian strikes on Ukraine's Odesa region. It left a minute later, at 23:42, tracking north of the Ukrainian settlement of Stepanivka. The ministry put its characteristics as similar to a Gheran-3 — the jet-powered variant of the Shahed design. The account records detection and departure; it does not record an engagement.

The crossing came at the end of the day on which Chișinău had answered the incident before it. On Sunday an object came down at Crocmaz, in the Ștefan Vodă district on the Ukrainian border, and exploded at roughly 2.5 metres after striking a tree in a shelter belt, damaging several houses without injuring anyone; preliminary examination of the fragments pointed to a Banderol loitering munition. The foreign ministry condemned it "in the strongest possible terms," called it "a serious violation of Moldova's sovereignty and territorial integrity," and recalled the ambassador from Moscow for consultations. President Maia Sandu: "This is a direct consequence of Russia's war, and it endangers us all." Moldova's air-defence answer is still in the procurement pipeline. The EU Council adopted a EUR 120 million European Peace Facility measure on 13 July to finance a mid-range air-defence system for the Moldovan armed forces, taking total EPF support to Moldova to EUR 317 million.

Général de corps d'armée Bruno Baratz, who commands the Commandement du combat futur (CCF, the army's future-combat command), announced on Tuesday the creation of a Force d'expertise et d'expérimentation — a hybrid formation drawing on serving soldiers, reservists, national-service volunteers, robots and drones, tasked with accelerating "the understanding of requirements" and adapting capability to give the land operational force its margin in what he called new realities. It succeeds the Force d'expertise du combat Scorpion, stood up in 2017 at Mailly-le-Camp to run technical-operational and tactical evaluation on the Scorpion armoured-vehicle programme. The CCF itself runs on roughly 130 military and civilian staff, organised in small teams. Baratz set the announcement alongside Pendragon, the army's roboticised combat unit, whose initial deployment is targeted for summer 2027.