WARSAW, Oct 27 (Reuters) - A maintenance centre for Lockheed Martin's Patriot interceptor missiles will be established in Poland, Deputy Defence Minister Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said on Tuesday.
Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have strained stocks of air-defence interceptor missiles and caused delivery delays, prompting countries to seek maintenance and production capabilities closer to home.
"Four countries competed for the European location of this investment: alongside Poland — Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway," Sobkowiak-Czarnecka wrote on social media platform X. "This success was not a given," she said.
The centre in Poland will be the only one outside the United States, Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said.
The Pentagon said, in a statement on its website, that the European Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Maintenance Facility (MMF) "will be underpinned by robust, transatlantic industrial cooperation, with critical supply chain integration led by Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden."
"By establishing regional maintenance, repair, and overhaul capabilities directly within the European theater, the MMF will dramatically shorten turnaround times and further secure critical supply lines," the statement said.
Sobkowiak-Czarnecka told reporters during a briefing in Brussels that the value of the investment would be around 1 billion zlotys ($253 million) and that it would take a dozen or so months to make the centre operational.
($1 = 3.9462 zlotys)
(Reporting by Karol Badohal, Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Aidan Lewis and Tomasz Janowski)
