Did the United States Just Send a Major Military Equipment Shipment to Poland?

Peter Gattuso

Thu, August 29, 2024 at 12:52 AM GMT+7

A recent viral Facebook reel shows a large shipment of U.S. military equipment arriving in the northern Polish city of Gdynia, located on the country’s Baltic coast. “Eight hundred pieces of American military equipment, including cars and tanks, arrived in Poland,” the video stated in text. “Bad news for Russians.”

The video is based on genuine footage from the Department of Defense (DOD), but it includes an incorrect figure for the amount of equipment delivered. Its lack of a time stamp means that it is also missing context. The video was posted to YouTube in December 2022 and was reposted under an account with the same name—“Military Superiority”—to Facebook on July 29.

The original footage comes from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), a multimedia archive maintained by the DOD, which identified more than 640 pieces of equipment arriving at a U.S. military base in Gdynia, Poland, in early December 2022. “Soldiers assigned to the 80th Movement Control Team, 330th Transportation Battalion, assisted the 598th Transportation Brigade with more than 640 pieces of equipment from the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Calvary Division, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, were off-loaded at the port facility located in Gdynia, Poland, December 3, 2022,” the DVIDS video caption says.

In November 2022, the U.S. Army announced it would send more than 2,400 pieces of equipment in total to U.S. Army bases stationed in three different European port cities: Alexandroupolis, Greece; Thessaloniki, Greece; and Gdynia, Poland. The delivery was part of a broader Army brigade deployment, which the Army described as a “regularly scheduled rotational deployment.”

The Army said the brigade deployment accompanying the equipment in three European port cities—including Gdynia, Poland—is part of “Operation Atlantic Resolve,” a U.S. military operation that seeks to deter Russian aggression. “Operation Atlantic Resolve (OAR) is the U.S. contingency operation in and around the U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) area of operations to deter Russia’s aggression against NATO and to reassure and bolster the alliance in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine,” the Defense Department explained in a quarterly review of the operation. “OAR also includes security assistance activities in support of Ukraine.”