Frag Out! Magazine

lling railway areas and equipment. For monitoring such extensive terrain, aerial platforms, including unmanned systems, are highly useful, and the Fly- Eye UAVs operated by the military are better suited for this role than the equipment available to the police. Unfortunately, these measures, while important, are temporary and ad hoc in nature. In times of crisis and war, the protection of critical infrastruc- ture is an obvious task for the Territorial Defense Forces; however, the challenge lies in scale. There are approximately 19,000 kilometers of railway tracks alone to secure. Even when excluding lines of lesser importance from the perspective of state security and defense, and focusing only on the most critical ones, such as major strategic corridors lin- king the Tricity area or port complexes with the interior of the country, east–west routes already used to transport aid to Ukraine and which would carry military equipment in a crisis, as well as nu- merous other elements of the network, including stations and sidings serving military units, the sco- pe remains immense. For many years, the system for protecting railway infrastructure operated under peacetime con- ditions, the primary issues were vandals and thie- ves, not saboteurs. As a result, the first line of protection is the Rail- way Protection Guard (SOK), which is not formally a state service but rather a specialized internal security formation of the infrastructure manager, PKP PLK, supplemented by private security per- sonnel, particularly visible at stations. The Police provide an additional layer, and the military serves as a further reinforcement. However, this refers only to the physical protection of infrastructure, whereas resilience has a much broader dimension. It encompasses the ability to rapidly adapt to crisis conditions. For example, ensuring a high availability of diesel locomotives in case electric rolling stock cannot be used, the capacity for rapid repair of da- mage, and ultimately the development of entirely new lines, the railway network must provide flexi- bility. It also includes a culture of security, put sim- ply, awareness of threats and the ability to quickly report suspicious situations. All of these elements together form a resilient system, which is, at the same time, a component of the broader civil defen- se system, an issue that will be addressed further. ANALYSIS

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