Poland EUR 3.5 Billion SAN Counter-Drone Program Faces Delivery Questions

Poland’s EUR 3.5 billion counter-drone programme, known as SAN, is facing its first public questions about delivery. The contract, worth PLN 15 billion and signed on January 30, 2026, covers 18 counter-drone battery modules built by the Polish defence group PGZ with Norway’s Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace and the Polish software company APS. The first systems were expected to reach troops by the end of 2026. Now a Polish newspaper reports they may not arrive until 2027 — and the programme’s defenders insist nothing has slipped.

Why Poland is buying now

Poland sits on NATO’s eastern flank, next to a war in which drones are used every day, and Russian drones have already crossed into Polish airspace. The threat is no longer theoretical: small, cheap aircraft can cross a border, watch a target, or strike one, for a fraction of the cost of the missile that shoots them down. That arithmetic is what drives programmes like SAN. A country that waits until the threat is overhead has already lost the cheap options, so Poland is buying layered drone defence now, at national scale, before it needs it in earnest. The eastern border is where the system will stand first, and it is the border the whole programme is built around.

The delivery question

The report came from Gazeta Wyborcza on November 6. It said the first SAN systems might not reach Polish troops until 2027, later than the end-of-2026 date that had been expected. PGZ responded the same day, saying the programme is running on its agreed schedule. The Defence Ministry gave a more detailed picture: factory acceptance testing of three platoons will be completed before the end of 2026, and physical deliveries to units will begin in 2027. APS chief executive Maciej Klemm had said in October, speaking to the Polish Press Agency, that milestones were on schedule. Read together, the statements describe a programme that is hitting its test dates but whose deliveries start a year later than some had hoped — a difference of emphasis that is easy to turn into a row about delays.

What SAN is

SAN is a layered system, not a single weapon. It integrates radar, electronic warfare, guns, missiles and interceptor drones under one command-and-control system — APS’s SkyView software — so that a cheap drone can be met with the cheapest effective answer rather than the most expensive one. Each battery module is a self-contained unit, with its own sensors and effectors, able to detect, track and defeat drones on its own; Kongsberg supplies PROTECTOR weapon systems, the remote weapon stations already used on vehicles around the world. The idea is scale: 18 battery modules that can be spread along Poland’s eastern border, each one working alone if it has to, and all of them able to work together. Against the small, cheap drones that now fill the sky over Ukraine, that kind of layered, scalable defence is the point of the whole programme.

The pieces around it

The programme is also pulling in suppliers beyond the main contractors. In September, Advanced Navigation signed a EUR 16 million contract to supply navigation systems for Kongsberg platforms — the kind of precise positioning that weapon stations and interceptor drones need to work. Contracts like that show how a single large programme spreads work across the industry, and how the counter-drone market is growing in layers: the big system integrators win the headline deals, and specialist suppliers provide the sensors, navigation and software underneath. The EUR 16 million figure is small against EUR 3.5 billion, but it is the kind of contract that keeps a specialist supplier busy for years.

Why it matters

Poland’s programme is one of the largest counter-drone buys in Europe, and its timeline will be watched by every other country planning the same thing. The lesson so far is a familiar one for defence procurement: factory testing and field delivery are different dates, and the gap between them is where political arguments start. For the counter-UAS industry, SAN is also a benchmark — EUR 3.5 billion for 18 modules sets a price for what layered drone defence costs at national scale, and it shows that governments are now buying drone mitigation the way they used to buy air defence: as a system, not a gadget.

Source: Adria Defense