During a Politburo meeting on December 22, 1981, General Jaruzelski said, “We have won the first battle.” His use of military language is not surprising, considering both his profession and the situation; however, he added cautiously, “We have not won the campaign (which will take several months).” More importantly, he admitted that one should not triumph prematurely, since “it will take ten years to recover from the devastation in [people’s] consciousness and lift the economy from ruins”—in other words, to win the war. It is difficult to take issue with this statement, even if some of the skirmishes of this battle had not yet been won: as the general was saying these words, miners from Ziemowit and Piast were still protesting underground, and a group of striking workers persisted at the Katowice Steelworks. Victory could, however, be proclaimed, since the enemy's main forces had been broken and its center crushed.

Nevertheless, this did not mean that the troops would return to their barracks. While it is true that most units had been withdrawn from the streets on January 7, approximately twenty-eight thousand soldiers from those assigned to “special tasks” remained in or near nine designated large cities (Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Katowice, Lublin, Łódź, Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw, and Wrocław), about seven thousand were at training grounds and could reach the area of operations within thirteen to fifteen hours, and about thirty-five thousand returned to where they were permanently stationed, where they could be deployed in one and a half to two days. These units had a total of about seventy thousand soldiers. Moreover, specially designated reserves of about twenty thousand soldiers were kept “on permanent readiness for action … throughout Poland,” about nine thousand were guarding selected sites (including weapons and ammunition plants), and about two thousand were posted along communication routes. In all, over a hundred thousand soldiers were in various degrees of readiness or already deployed. The battle had been won, but the troops had not yet left the field.

The army did not limit itself to guarding, pacifying, and maintaining the psychosis of martial law. It also assumed a key position in the state administration, the economy, and the communist party: eleven military men were ministers or deputy ministers in civilian departments, thirteen were voivods or deputy voivods, and nine were secretaries of the communist party's voivodship committees.