The Amber Division shoots at drones in Ustka. A range that served navy, army and industry in one month

Mobile counter-drone teams of Poland's 16th Pomeranian Mechanised Division have trained at the Air Force Training Centre in Ustka in operations against unmanned aircraft, including live fire at targets imitating drones. The Olsztyn-based division stresses that the modern battlefield demands rapid reaction, precision and effective detection of threats from the air.

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01 october 2026   |   13:12   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. sierż. Piotr Szafarski

It was the closing stage of the division's September air defence concentration, which began on its home range and moved to the coast for the live-fire phase. Two weeks earlier the Polish Navy's air defenders fired on the same range during the Black Defender exercise, and in spring more than a dozen counter-drone systems were tested there for the East Shield programme.

The full set of divisional air defence

The concentration, as the division reported in late September, covers the Poprad self-propelled missile systems and the shoulder-launched Piorun, cooperation with Bystra radars and the use of Merops unmanned systems, that is interceptor drones. The aim is not to operate a single system but to coordinate many different assets that have to work together.

Mobile counter-drone teams are the new element in that picture. They are groups of soldiers on light vehicles, armed with small arms and machine guns, air defence systems and electronic warfare equipment, meant to reach a threatened area quickly and engage individual drones where a missile would be uneconomic or impossible. The army has been building them since the incidents of September 2025, when around twenty drones entered Polish airspace. In March the General Staff introduced counter-drone shooting with individual weapons into the firing programmes of the whole armed forces. Ustka is where that programme becomes practice.

Why this range

The Air Force Training Centre in Ustka is the only range in Poland where fire can be directed at aerial targets over the open sea, in a zone reaching far into the Baltic. It is where Newa and Patriot systems fire, where in May the 16th Division carried out live firing of the Mała Narew system with CAMM missiles, where the Perun suborbital rocket was launched, and where in April around 15 solutions for detecting and countering drones were tested.

September 2026 shows what the range has become within a year: in one month it hosted naval air defenders, army units and industrial trials in the same field. Ustka is now the country's main counter-drone training centre, even though formally it belongs to the Air Force.

A division rooted in Pomerania, defending the gap

The name Amber Division, which the 16th uses in its communications, refers to the region the unit has been tied to since the post-war years: Pomerania, the Vistula delta and Warmia, through which the amber route once ran. Formally it is the 16th Pomeranian Mechanised Division named after King Casimir IV Jagiellon.

Its traditions reach back to 1919 and the Pomeranian Rifle Division formed during the Greater Poland Uprising, which fought the Bolsheviks in 1920, including in the Battle of Warsaw and on the Niemen. In September 1939 the 16th Pomeranian Infantry Division fought on the Bzura and for Łowicz; the division's day falls on 14 September in memory of those battles, which ended with the unit's destruction in the Kampinos Forest. After the war the 16th Kashubian Mechanised, later Armoured, Division was stationed in Elbląg. The present division was formed in 1990, and in December 2019 its headquarters moved from Elbląg to Olsztyn.

Today it is the division of the eastern flank. Its brigades stand in Braniewo, Giżycko and Bartoszyce, its air defence regiment in Gołdap, and its task is the defence of the Suwałki Gap. In the second half of 2025 it commanded the Safe Podlasie operation on the Belarusian border, and with detached forces it is building the East Shield. It is receiving K2 tanks, Borsuk infantry fighting vehicles, Rak mortars and Poprad systems, and its structure is growing by the 16th Motorised Brigade and a reconnaissance battalion.

What it means for the coast

The drones fired at in Ustka imitate a threat from one direction. The division closest to the Kaliningrad exclave and Belarus has to be the first in the land forces with ready answers to what crossed the border in September 2025 and what appeared near Braniewo this year in the shape of a Mi-8 helicopter. A seaside range associated for decades with missile firings is turning into the place where the response to the cheapest and most common weapon of this war is rehearsed.

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16 Dywizja Zmechanizowana Bursztynowa Dywizja poligon Ustka zwalczanie dronów Centralny Poligon Sił Powietrznych

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