Poland’s F-35 fighter fleet keeps growing: 12 done, 4 more coming

Poland’s twelfth F-35 has completed ground and flight testing and is ready for delivery, Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defence Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz announced on X, adding that production of the next four aircraft is nearing completion at Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth, Texas factory.

The announcement, posted directly by Kosiniak-Kamysz on his official account, puts Poland’s F-35 acquisition program at a visible and accelerating pace. Twelve aircraft through testing, four more coming off the production line, and a destination already named: the 32nd Tactical Aviation Base in Łask, the western Polish air base that Warsaw has designated as the F-35’s permanent home in Polish service. Łask’s selection as the F-35 base is consistent with Poland’s broader strategic logic of concentrating its most capable air assets at a facility positioned to cover both the western approaches and the country’s long eastern border with Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

The F-35A is the conventional takeoff and landing variant that Poland selected, a fifth-generation multirole stealth fighter that combines low-observable airframe design with the advanced sensor fusion, electronic warfare capability, and networked combat systems that define the platform’s operational value within NATO’s integrated air picture. Poland signed its F-35 acquisition agreement with the United States government in January 2020, ordering 32 aircraft in a deal valued at approximately $4.6 billion. The program has proceeded through production and testing without the significant delays that have affected some other F-35 customer nations, and Kosiniak-Kamysz’s announcement suggests the delivery schedule is tracking on pace.

The four aircraft currently finishing production at Fort Worth will follow the same testing sequence before making the transatlantic flight to Poland. The Fort Worth facility is Lockheed Martin’s primary F-35 final assembly and checkout location, where aircraft from all three variants — the A, B, and C models — move through a production flow that serves the U.S. military and a growing list of international partner nations simultaneously. Poland’s position in that production queue has been secured through its Foreign Military Sale agreement with the U.S. government, which manages the procurement on behalf of Polish defense authorities and coordinates delivery logistics with Lockheed Martin.

Poland’s urgency in fielding the F-35 reflects a security environment that has changed dramatically since the original purchase decision in 2020. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 transformed Poland’s threat perception from a long-term strategic concern into an immediate operational reality. Warsaw shares a border with both Belarus, where Russian forces have stationed troops and conducted joint exercises, and the Kaliningrad Oblast, the heavily militarized Russian exclave on the Baltic that hosts advanced air defense systems, Iskander ballistic missiles, and naval assets capable of threatening NATO’s northern flank. Having stealth-capable, sensor-fused fifth-generation fighters operational at Łask gives Poland an air combat capability qualitatively superior to anything Russia currently stations in the region, and integrates Polish airpower into NATO’s broader fifth-generation network alongside F-35s operated by other alliance members including the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Italy.