Frag Out! Magazine

Sad Reality of Transformation The period of political and economic transformation of the 1990s made the necessity to further maintain the highway strips highly questionable. Notably, the location of the for- mer highway strips in Poland is conditioned by the tasks as- signed to Poland as a member of the Warsaw Pact. It is not aligned with the current Polish defense concept - assuming that the main source of threat is located in the East. In the 1990s, the first highway strip (DOL) ever was still being used, located near Szczecin. The lack of funds necessary to maintain the highway strips, in the budgetary plans of the local bodies responsible for maintaining the roads led to a gradual technical degradation of the former highway strips. Most of the DOL sections to- day can no longer serve their original purpose. During the restoration works, the width of the road was reduced, and the aprons were being demolished. Today, traveling along such sections, it is often difficult to even notice the former, aviation-focused purpose of such infrastructure. Prior to the Route 604 exercise, the last of the Polish highway strip operations took place in 2003. Later on, for reasons tied to finances, the exercises were only limited to taxiway lan- ding training at the Powidz air base, and then the Polish Air Force definitively resigned from training the pilots in the use of public roads as runways. DOL Resurrected The idea of scattering the assets, should a threat emerge is still valid - which has been proven by the war in Ukraine. Despite the fact that two years have gone by, since the start of the Russian aggression, and the unquestionable air do- minance of the Russian Air Force, the blue-yellow roundel jets can still be spotted in the air. The available imagery and information show that the Ukrainian Air Force uses public roads as provisional airbases. Hence, these days, the Polish Air Force also assumes that roads may be used to deploy detached elements of the Air Force units. After 1990 only one, entirely new highway strip was esta- blished in Poland. It was arranged during construction works related to the A4 highway, between Tarnów and Dębica. Considering the traffic there (as this section of the road be- ars the critical meaning in transport infrastructure) it seems less than probable that it would ever be used for exercise purposes. It is worth recalling the fact that problems tied to the closure of a commonly used road were the final nail in the coffin of the highway strip near Września (a section of the A2 highway). DOL Wielbark, located on District Road 604, is another story. This is a district level road, with low intensity of traffic and of local significance. Closing that road for a longer period does REPORT

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