It is scarcely known that the Polish Navy operated two guided-missile destroyers from 1970 until 2003. Although by no means modern ships even for 1970s and 1980s standards, these vessels nonetheless constituted one of the few classes of naval vessels armed with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) operating in the Baltic Sea that were not operated by the Soviet Union for a significant part of the Cold War. The decommissioning of the Project 61MP-class destroyer ORP Warszawa in 2003 brought an end to 73-years of consecutive destroyer operations by the Polish Navy.