A New Deterrence Strategy for Lithuania
Our 20 strategic defense initiatives guarantee unbearable costs to any aggressor and ensure Lithuania's full independence and sovereignty through strength. Not dependency.
Strategy
4 initiativesConventional Cost-Imposition Deterrence (Baltic-Anchored)
A Baltic-anchored, Lithuanian-led conventional strike arsenal — drones, cruise missiles, and a survival layer — sized to make any Russian or Belarusian aggression strategically unprofitable without depending on alliance resupply.
The 2026 Iran war (28 February to 8 April, 39 days) produced live evidence that mass precision strike with home-built production can impose meaningful costs even on a coalition with advanced air defenses. Iran fired around 1,471 ballistic missiles plus drones, damaging an early-warning radar at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar around 3 March 2026. Patriot PAC-3 interceptors deployed by Gulf Cooperation Council partners performed at roughly 86 percent intercept against the inbound salvo. In January 2026, Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon announced a seven-year framework (2026 to 2032) to triple PAC-3 MSE production from about 600 to 2,000 missiles per year, with the higher rate due by 2030. The lesson for Lithuania: any defence that depends on receiving high-end allied interceptors during a crisis is structurally exposed. This is a gap Lithuania must close on Lithuanian terms, and the recommendation here is a study, not a prescription. The recommended next step is a cross-party Seimas working group, with input from the Ministry of National Defence, the Lithuanian Armed Forces General Staff, NATO Multi-Domain Headquarters Wiesbaden, and Polish and Ukrainian industrial partners, to scope a phased Baltic-anchored arsenal: home-built one-way attack drones, tactical FPVs, decoys, and cruise missiles, paired with a dedicated counter-drone and short-range air-defence layer to keep the launchers and factories alive. A budget envelope around 3.55 billion euros over five years (about 0.8 percent of GDP per year, drawn from the existing 4.79 billion euro 2026 defence budget at 5.38 percent of GDP plus EU SAFE allocation) is the planning anchor. The path forward — which platforms, which partners, what cross-border release authority, what NATO command-and-control protocol — is for the Lithuanian government, the Seimas, and NATO commanders to determine.
French Extended Deterrence Inclusion Pathway for Lithuania
Lithuania is absent from the partner list Macron named at Île Longue on 2 March 2026 — the realistic path is a multi-year diplomatic effort, not a near-term hosting deal.
On 2 March 2026, French President Emmanuel Macron used a speech at the Île Longue submarine base to set out a doctrine of forward deterrence and to name seven partner countries for nuclear-capable bomber exercises: Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, and Denmark (Élysée; CSIS, Atlantic Council, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, ECFR, Egmont, March 2026). Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, and Finland are not on the list. The speech did not refuse the Baltic states; it simply did not include them. Major analysts read the absence as de-facto exclusion for now. The offer covers temporary aircraft deployments and exercises, with partners contributing intelligence, early-warning, and air defence — not permanent basing or warhead storage. France then went bilateral with Poland at the Tusk-Macron Gdansk meeting of 20 April 2026, the first follow-up to the Treaty of Nancy of 9 May 2025; the Baltics got no parallel bilateral. The Northwood Declaration of 10 July 2025 is a UK-France bilateral with no accession clause (gov.uk; IISS September 2025). Lithuania still has reason to diversify away from sole reliance on US extended deterrence: the Iran war of 28 February to 8 April 2026 (39 days) saw roughly 1,471 Iranian ballistic missiles fired and left Gulf-allied PAC-3 stocks about 86 percent depleted, with MBDA only doubling Aster output through 2026. The recommended next step is a study by the Seimas, the Foreign Ministry, and Defence Ministry — coordinated with Polish counterparts — mapping options in three honest tiers: a declaratory political signal, a conventional Rafale rotation similar to Sweden in April 2025, and any longer-term nuclear-capable exercise inclusion. Whether to amend Article 137, what to ask Paris for at each tier, and how to hedge against the roughly 30-40 percent chance a Rassemblement National presidency in April 2027 reverses the doctrine are decisions for Lithuanian constitutional scholars, the Seimas, and the executive.
Lithuanian Border Defense Line
A 952 km denial line along Lithuania's hostile border with Belarus and Kaliningrad, built from mines, ditches, drones and restored wetlands rather than concrete bunkers — €2.5-3.5 billion over eight years, benchmarked to Poland's Shield East.
Lithuania shares 952 kilometres of land border with hostile neighbours — 679 km with Belarus, 273 km with Kaliningrad. Vilnius sits just 35 km from the Belarusian border. The other 692 km of Lithuanian land border is shared with NATO allies Latvia and Poland and is deliberately left unfortified, because building defences against an ally would signal distrust of the Article 5 promise. The hostile-axis line cannot be a chain of concrete strongpoints. Russia now produces an estimated 75,000 glide bombs per year (RUSI), and a single 250-500 kg warhead defeats the bunker classes that older designs relied on (FDD, 31 October 2025). Russian-built ground drones such as the Depesha and Buggy are purpose-made to crawl up to dragon's-teeth belts and destroy them (Newsweek/Rostec). The Surovikin Line in southern Ukraine — the densest fixed defence built this century — was breached at Robotyne on 28 August 2023 (US Army 'Blocked and Bloodied' after-action report; RUSI). Fortifications buy time; they do not stop an attack on their own. The recommended next step is for the Ministry of National Defence and the Seimas Defence Committee to commission a costed engineering study that compares a layered design — smart mines, anti-tank ditches, dispersed drone-operator positions, and 40,000 hectares of restored border wetlands led by Vice-Minister Tomas Godliauskas (LRT, 14 October 2025) — against the bunker-led approach Estonia is leading on its own border. The study should test the design against Polish Shield East unit cost (about €3.64 million per kilometre over 700 km), against current Polish build rates of roughly 5 km per month, and against Lithuania's mine-supply gap, which is large: a 1,000 anti-tank plus 2,000 anti-personnel mines per kilometre target across 952 km is roughly fifty-seven times current domestic production. The path forward — final architecture, exact budget profile, role of EU SAFE loans versus national funding, and the place of anti-corruption controls after the Kursk-governor fortification-budget theft — is for Lithuanian institutions to determine.
Total National Mobilization Doctrine
A costed Lithuanian total-mobilization doctrine sitting beneath NATO forward defence — the third layer that activates only if the multinational brigade and the German brigade in Lithuania are overrun.
Lithuania has built the legal scaffolding for national mobilization in stages. An emergency-authority law passed on 10 August 2021. A 21 June 2022 amendment raised the annual conscription intake from 3,400 to 4,400 and the active reserve from 2,500 to 5,000. On 19 December 2024 the Riflemen's Union (Šaulių Sąjunga) was barred from admitting holders of Russian, Belarusian or Chinese passports, and in 2025 the same bar was extended to the armed forces and the Military Academy. The 2026 defence budget is 4.79 billion euros, 5.38 percent of GDP, and the 2026 conscription call-up is 5,000. The trained active reserve stands at roughly 28,000; the Riflemen at 17 to 18,000; the Ministry of Defence's published target is 50,000 reserve by 2030. A claimed September 2025 amendment lifting the conscription intake to 7,040 and the force ceiling to 29,380 has no primary source and has been removed. The gap is not the absence of conscription. The gap is the rate at which Lithuania can fill rifles under fire if NATO's forward defence — the multinational brigade in Lithuania and the German Panzerbrigade 45, which reaches full combat capability in 2027 — is overrun before reinforcement arrives. Russia targets mobilization centres in the opening salvo (Rukla, Pabradė, Klaipėda are inside the Belarusian glide-bomb envelope) and Iran's experience in the 39-day war of 28 February to 8 April 2026 showed that decentralized command with successors named three ranks down survives leadership-targeting. This doctrine recommends a costed national study and pilot framework — not a fixed end-state — covering six pillars (military, civil, economic, psychological, digital, social defence) anchored on NATO Civil Emergency Planning, EU FIMI standards, hardened dispersed mobilization centres, and a financing path of 5 to 6 percent of GDP through 2030. The specific manning curve, the second conscription-doubling act, the cache architecture and the women's-track design are determinations for the Seimas and the Ministry of Defence.
Drones
3 initiativesCounter-Drone Interceptor Swarm — Low-Cost Kinetic Tier
Lithuania has bought the high-end air defence; what is missing is a low-cost interceptor that can absorb the volume of mass Russian drone attacks without emptying million-dollar magazines.
Between 22 and 24 April 2026 Lithuania densified its air defence: the Cabinet approved 48 Merops interceptor drones (lrt.lt, militarnyi.com); Washington greenlit a $214M AIM-9X package (overtdefense.com); €234M of NASAMS deliveries went to the 1st Division (thedefensepost.com); APS of Poland was contracted to protect energy sites (unmannedairspace.info); and the German Panzerbrigade 45 will deploy Skyranger 30 short-range air-defence on Lithuanian soil (Janes IAV 2026). The Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control system (FAAD-C2, Northrop Grumman, $14.3M for the three Baltic states) ties these together. Defence Minister Šakalienė holds, since the Seimas amendments of 23 September 2025 (airspace only), authority to order military force against drones in restricted areas (militarnyi.com). What that stack lacks is a magazine deep enough for mass attack. Russia produced 4,186 strike-Shaheds in March 2026 and has staged single waves of 810 (ISIS-Online). At 200 interceptors per month, the deficit is 20.9 times. The 39-day Iran war confirmed the risk: PAC-3 stocks across the Gulf Cooperation Council were drawn down by roughly 86 percent, and the $4.76B Lockheed contract of 10 April 2026 to rebuild Patriot does not deliver until June 2030 (Bryen, weapons.substack.com; Fortune 24 April 2026). Lithuania cannot rely on US resupply during a Baltic crisis. The recommended next step is a joint Baltic working group, anchored on the Latvian-led Origin BLAZE / Estonian EIRSHIELD supply chain that achieved the first automated Baltic intercept in 2025 and is now deployed in Estonia, Latvia and Belgium (DroneLife 15 October 2025; Defense Post 9 February 2026), to study how Lithuania joins that chain and what magazine floor and production rate the Seimas should set. Specific platforms, vendors and unit counts remain determinations for the Ministry of Defence and the Seimas.
Defensive Drone Interceptor Fleet (Sub-€5K Consumable Layer)
A sub-€5K consumable interceptor layer to absorb Geran-2 attrition and Gerbera decoys, freeing Lithuania's higher-tier missiles for the jet-powered Geran-3 that small drones cannot catch.
The Russian one-way attack drone threat has split in two. The Geran-2 (a piston-engine Shahed cruising at roughly 185 km/h, with a 50 kg warhead and a unit cost of $20-50K) is still the volume target, and small interceptor drones in the $2-7K range can defeat it on a tail-chase. The Geran-3 is different. It is a jet-powered variant cruising at 500-600 km/h with a warhead of up to 300 kg and a ceiling near 9,000 m (Army Recognition; UNITED24). A small interceptor at 343 km/h cannot catch it from behind: the closing speed is negative, so the chase is physically impossible. Geran-3 has to be engaged head-on or by gun and missile systems already in Lithuania's inventory or pipeline. That pipeline is the right starting point. In April 2026 alone, Lithuania's cabinet approved 48 Merops AS-3 fixed-wing interceptors (22 April, LRT), the United States notified a $214M AIM-9X sale (24 April), an additional €234M of NASAMS deliveries arrived for the 1st Division, a Polish APS contract was let for energy-site counter-drone defence, and the German Panzerbrigade 45 deployed Skyranger 30 guns under host-nation arrangements. Latvia's Origin BLAZE was delivered to Estonia, Latvia and Belgium in February 2026; Lithuania is not on that customer list. The recommended next step is a defence-ministry feasibility study, run with industry and allied input, that maps the cheapest sustainable layer to absorb the Geran-2 and Gerbera decoy tier, evaluates whether to join the BLAZE supply chain or scale the domestic Granta line, and sets honest magazine-depth targets against Russia's March 2026 tempo of 4,186 strike-Shahed per month. The specific platform mix, production ramp, and budget envelope are decisions for the Ministry of National Defence and the Seimas to determine.
Mobile Tethered Low-Altitude Surveillance Network
A mobile network of small tethered drones at 100-200 metres altitude that watches the airspace below 500 metres — the band where Russian FPV strike drones, Orlan reconnaissance drones, and Geran-2 cruise drones operate, and where ground radar cannot see.
Lithuania's defensive geometry has a hole. Ground-based radar misses low-flying drones because forests, hills, and the curvature of the earth block line-of-sight under about 1,000 metres. Russia and Belarus exploit this gap daily: FPV drones below 150 metres, Orlan reconnaissance drones at 200-1,000 metres, Geran-2 cruise drones at 60-500 metres, plus hybrid balloons and Gerbera decoys probing the radar picture. Lithuania's incoming kinetic stack — 48 Merops AS-3 interceptors (April 2026), €214M of AIM-9X missiles, additional NASAMS, and the Bundeswehr Panzerbrigade 45 with Skyranger 30 — needs upstream cueing; Ukrainian operational data shows kinetic effectors waste 30-50% of shots on decoys when fired without sensor fusion. A drone tethered to a vehicle by a power-and-data cable, hovering at 100-200 metres, sees what ground radar cannot, and runs for days at roughly €13-14 per flight-hour — a few hundred times cheaper than a manned helicopter. This is the low-altitude complement to Poland's Barbara aerostat ($960M, ~4,000 metres, 226 km horizon, fielding 2026); it does not replace Barbara and does not see Geran-3 jet variants cruising at 9,000 metres. Honest geometry: 25 vehicle-mounted nodes at 10-15 km sensor radius cover 12-27% of national territory — point defence of named sites plus mobile reinforcement of the 952 km eastern border, not blanket coverage. Architecture must be mobile-only: Russia produces around 75,000 guided bombs (KABs) a year and the UMPB-5R reaches 130-200 km from Belarusian airspace, so any fixed tower becomes a target. The recommended next step is a Phase 1 demonstrator of three vehicle-mounted systems at Klaipėda LNG, Vilnius, and Šiauliai, costed at €12-18M, as the operational test of the September 2025 Šakalienė amendments to the Law on Aviation. Final platform selection, network size, and integration choices are decisions for the Ministry of National Defence and the FY26 budget cycle.
Intelligence
3 initiativesBaltic Spy Satellites
Satellite reconnaissance for the Baltics — start by buying priority access to Germany's new Lithuania-focused constellation, then add national satellites only where the gap is real.
Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have no spy satellites; they rely on commercial providers and on what allies choose to share. Two recent events show the fragility. In June 2025 the US asked Vantor (formerly Maxar) to stop publishing imagery of the Iran war, and the company complied indefinitely (Times of Israel). On 20 April 2026 in Gdansk, France and Poland signed the first follow-up to the Treaty of Nancy, including a France-Poland mutual-security clause and a Polish military satellite-communications partnership with Airbus, Thales and Radmor; the Baltic states do not appear in the named partner list (Élysée joint declaration; EU Today). At the same time, Germany's December 2025 contract with Rheinmetall and ICEYE — €1.7 billion for the SPOCK 1 radar-satellite constellation, services through 2030, production from late 2026 — is explicitly named to protect the German-led Lithuania Brigade and the Suwałki Gap (SpaceNews; Rheinmetall press release, 18 December 2025). The capability is being built and aimed at Lithuania, paid for by Berlin. The recommendation is a two-track study, not a fixed procurement. A working group under the Ministry of National Defence, in trilateral format with Estonia and Latvia, should test two propositions in parallel. First: whether a sovereign-priority subscription on Germany's SPOCK 1 (estimated €15-25 million per nation per year, deliverable in around eighteen months) closes most of the gap at a fraction of a sovereign-build cost. Second: where remaining tasking gaps are operationally fatal — which would justify selectively layering national satellites, anchored on the Vilnius-based manufacturer NanoAvionics, a Kongsberg-owned firm already building a radar spy-satellite for European defence customers (Payload). A full sovereign 5-year programme is honestly costed at roughly €575 million total, around €192 million as Lithuania's one-third share — about three times the figure earlier circulated. Final scope, vendors and budget are decisions for the Seimas and the Ministry of National Defence.
Offensive Cyber Effects Branch — LTCYBERCOM
Lithuania's defensive Cyber Defence Command stood up on 1 January 2025; the missing piece is an offensive-effects branch that can contribute named cyber strikes to allied operations the way France, the United Kingdom, and the United States already do.
The Lithuanian Cyber Defence Command (LTCYBERCOM) has been operational since 1 January 2025, with a Signal Battalion added on 3 June 2025 (sources: kam.lt; thedefensepost.com 2025-01-07). Its public mandate is defensive — protecting Lithuanian networks, communications systems, and the electromagnetic spectrum. It has no announced offensive component. Allied cyber operations show what that gap costs in a real campaign. On 11 March 2026, US Cyber Command contributed to Operation Epic Fury against Iran: a tool called Stryker, pushed through a stolen Microsoft Intune administrator account, wiped more than 200,000 devices across 79 countries (Nextgov 2026-03; CSIS). On 29-30 December 2025, Russian state hackers (the group known as Sandworm) destroyed the digital systems running two Polish power stations by stealing the certificates that authenticate utility networks. Lithuania currently has no equivalent capability to offer the alliance, and no tool of its own to impose costs in cyber when an adversary targets Lithuanian critical infrastructure. This is a gap Lithuania must close on Lithuanian terms, and the path forward is not obvious. A new offensive-effects branch raises questions of statutory authority (the lead role belongs at the Antrasis operatyvinių tarnybų departamentas, the military-intelligence body known as AOTD, with LTCYBERCOM as operational integrator and the National Cyber Security Centre, NKSC, in its existing defensive role), of legal doctrine (peacetime espionage is permitted under Tallinn Manual 2.0; destructive attacks require a crisis trigger and allied cover under the rules on countermeasures and use of force), and of cost (peer benchmark suggests €80-120M over four years, with a 10-year lifecycle of €200-300M, roughly three times the figure circulated in earlier drafts). The recommended next step is a cross-government working group — AOTD, LTCYBERCOM, NKSC, the Ministry of Justice, and the Seimas National Security and Defence Committee — that maps statutory authority, allied integration under the Macron Île Longue framework and the Treaty of Nancy, and the budget envelope, and reports back with a phased pilot proposal.
Baltic SIGINT and Electronic Intelligence Enhancement
Lithuania shares a 273-kilometre land border with Russian Kaliningrad — a target-rich electromagnetic environment its military intelligence can exploit to feed allied targeting, if existing capacity is augmented and integrated into NATO.
Signals intelligence — the interception of military radio, radar, and other electronic emissions — is how a small country turns geography into alliance leverage. Lithuania's military intelligence service, known by its Lithuanian acronym AOTD (the Second Investigation Department, under the Ministry of National Defence), already does this work; this initiative augments that baseline rather than starting from scratch. The geographic position is unusual in NATO: a 273-kilometre land border with Kaliningrad along the Nemunas river (per Wikipedia's Lithuania-Russia border entry), Lithuanian villages such as Panemunė and Smalininkai sitting under one kilometre from the line, the resort town of Nida about 22 kilometres from the Kaliningrad coast, and Russia's large circular antenna array near Chernyakhovsk roughly 60 kilometres from the border (per Wikipedia's Chernyakhovsk CDAA entry and defencematters.eu). On the other side, Russian electronic-warfare brigades — Krasukha-4 jamming satellite navigation, R-330Zh Zhitel jamming cellular, Murmansk-BN jamming high-frequency radio, Pole-21 jamming GPS over wide areas, and Borisoglebsk-2 as the integrated brigade-level system — sit within range of Lithuanian territory and shape the threat picture. This is a gap Lithuania should close on Lithuanian terms. The recommended next step is a defence-intelligence study, conducted by AOTD with the Ministry of National Defence and the National Security Council, that maps the realistic augmentation envelope (mobile collection, a redundant processing federation, a trilateral Vilnius-Tallinn-Riga coordination cell, expanded bilaterals with the United States National Security Agency and the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters, and expanded participation in the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre at RAF Molesworth), confirms the right classification architecture (BICES at NATO SECRET on accredited national systems, with top-secret signals material flowing through bilateral conduits), and recommends the spending tier. The path forward — which sites, which platforms, which partners, which procurement vehicles — is for AOTD, the Ministry, and the Seimas defence committee to determine; specific kill-chain detail belongs in a classified annex, not in this public document.
Strike
3 initiativesSpace-Domain Resilience and NATO APSS Contribution
Lithuania enters the alliance space-architecture rooms (APSS, CSpO, Treaty of Nancy follow-on) as an eastern-flank GLONASS-denial node and Space Situational Awareness contributor — moratorium-compliant, reversible-only, no kinetic anti-satellite weapons.
Lithuania is bound by the European Union's 2022 collective pledge and the United Nations General Assembly's 155-vote 2022 moratorium against destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite testing. Kinetic anti-satellite pooling is therefore off the table — there is also no NATO anti-satellite pool to join. The realistic pathway is alliance membership in the rooms where space-domain decisions are made. The Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space programme reached initial operational capability on 4 December 2025 with seventeen contributing nations averaging €42.8 million each (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Türkiye, United States — Lithuania and Estonia absent, door open). The Combined Space Operations initiative remains a ten-nation club; partner status is requested through the French channel opened by the Treaty of Nancy (signed 9 May 2025 between Poland and France; first follow-on at Tusk-Macron Gdansk on 20 April 2026, advancing an Airbus / Thales / Radmor Polish military satellite-communications track without Lithuania). Macron's Île Longue speech on 2 March 2026 named Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom at Northwood; the Baltic states, Norway and Finland were absent from the named list — analysts at the Atlantic Council, ECFR, Chatham House and CSIS read this as de-facto exclusion, not explicit exclusion. This is a gap Lithuania should close on Lithuanian terms. The recommended next step is a parliamentary working group, with Ministry of National Defence and French liaison input, to scope an accession application to Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space, a Combined Space Operations partner-status request, and a rider on the Treaty of Nancy follow-on covering Suwałki Gap satellite-communications redundancy. Sovereign capability — should the working group confirm the path — would narrow to GLONASS user-segment denial (jamming the ground users in Lithuanian airspace; the satellite stays intact in medium-Earth orbit) and one to two Space Situational Awareness optical sites, alongside a research-only laser-dazzler track at Brolis Semiconductors and Aktyvus Photonics. The illustrative envelope is roughly €48 million over three years; final scope, vendors and architecture are procurement decisions for the Ministry of National Defence and the Seimas.
Sovereign Deep-Strike Drone Capability (1,000-1,500 km)
Lithuania has no sovereign way to make a Russian aggressor pay a price on Russian territory; this initiative flags the gap and recommends a costed study of a Ukrainian-style long-range drone tier (€30,000-60,000 per unit, 1,000-1,500 km range) paired with a hardened home air defence built first.
Lithuania has no way to put Russian refineries, airfields or command centres at risk. Russian glide-bomb production runs at roughly 75,000 a year (RUSI, 2025) and Shahed-style drones reached a single-night wave of 810 on 7 September 2025 (H I Sutton). On 2 March 2026, President Macron named France's nuclear-umbrella partners at Ile Longue (Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, with the United Kingdom at Northwood); the Baltics were not on the list. The Treaty of Nancy, signed in Nancy on 9 May 2025 between France and Poland, had its first Tusk-Macron follow-up in Gdansk on 20 April 2026 (Notes from Poland); Lithuania is not a party. The Iran air campaign of 28 February to 8 April 2026 (39 days, around 1,471 ballistic missiles) drove Gulf-allied PAC-3 stocks to about 14 per cent remaining, with US-specific stocks near 50 per cent (CSIS Last Rounds; CNN, 21 April 2026). Lockheed's PAC-3 ramp from 600 to 2,000 a year arrives in 2030. The recommended next step is for the Ministry of National Defence and the Seimas Defence Committee to commission an engineering and legal study of a sovereign deep-strike tier built on the only combat-validated model: Ukrainian long-range one-way attack drones (Lyutyi, Beaver, AN-196) at €30,000-60,000 per unit, plus a small number of cruise missiles in the Long-Neptune class at around €1.2 million. Two findings drive sequencing. First, without a hardened Lithuanian magazine of 1,500-2,500 ready interceptors, a Russian retaliation at 90-180 weapons per wave exhausts current inventory in about 3.7 waves; deep-strike before home defence is self-defeating. Second, only the northern arc (Pulkovo, Smolensk, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk, Kaliningrad, 300-700 km) is reachable via direct Belarus or Russia overflight; the southern arc (Saratov, Volgograd, Engels-2, Novorossiysk) needs Polish airspace transit Poland has no interest in granting. Final architecture, budget profile, partner roles and legal authorities for cross-border action are decisions for Lithuanian institutions.
Low-Cost Loitering Munition Mass Production
Lithuania cannot import strike drones at the volume a real war demands, so it has to build its own — starting with a working Granta production line that today turns out only several hundred FPV drones a month.
The 2026 Iran war (28 February to 8 April, 39 days) exhausted Western premium-munition stockpiles: the Saudi and Gulf bloc burned through roughly 86 percent of its Patriot PAC-3 missiles (CSIS Last Rounds), and United States stocks were drawn down (CNN, 21 April 2026). Lockheed Martin's PAC-3 ramp to 2,000 a year by 2030 is too slow to help Lithuania before 2028. Two import options also closed: Wild Hornets STING was export-blocked (The War Zone, March 2026), and Helsing's HX-2 was paused in January 2026 over a 25 percent take-off failure rate and electronic-warfare problems with its AI targeting (Bloomberg, 19 January 2026). Lithuania is absent from Macron's Île Longue partner list of 2 March 2026 — absent, not explicitly excluded — and is not a party to the Polish-French Treaty of Nancy (signed 9 May 2025; Tusk-Macron Gdansk on 20 April 2026 was its first follow-up). This is a gap Lithuania must close on Lithuanian terms. Granta Autonomy, run by chief executive Gediminas Guoba (Litvinas is a co-founder, not the CEO), produces several hundred FPV drones a month with a stated target of thousands a month (dronelife.com, 30 September 2024). NanoAvionics (Kongsberg-owned satellite company) and Brolis Defence (infrared sensors, electronic-warfare optics) are not FPV producers. The recommended next step is an industrial study by the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of the Economy, and the State Defence Council that maps a realistic path: a conservative year-six target of 30,000 to 50,000 FPV a month (sixty- to one-hundred-fold scale-up from the Granta baseline), a labour need of about 960 workers at that volume scaling toward 20,000 for half a million a year (almost certainly needing Polish and Ukrainian co-production), and European funding pull via EDIRPA (310 million euros across 27 states), PESCO loitering-munition strands, and SAFE (6.3 billion for Lithuania — a loan serviced from defence budget, not a grant). Scale, vendor mix, and dispersal are determinations for the Lithuanian government and Seimas.
Legal
2 initiativesConstitutional Continuity of Government Reform
A single Russian salvo on central Vilnius could incapacitate both the President and the Speaker of the Seimas — the only two officeholders the Constitution authorises to exercise presidential powers — creating serious ambiguity over the chief-of-command role and the constitutionally clearest pathway for collective-defence requests to NATO.
In case of elimination of the President, the Lithuanian Constitution names the Seimas Speaker as the sole acting head of state (Article 89). No one else may step in: the Prime Minister, the Government, and every other official are explicitly barred from exercising presidential powers. Vilnius sits just 35km from the Belarusian border and 306km from Kaliningrad. A Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile reaches the capital in 102-146 seconds; an Iskander-K cruise missile in 130-175 seconds. The Presidential Palace and the Seimas chamber stand less than two kilometres apart in central Vilnius — within the impact envelope of a single coordinated salvo. If both the President and the Speaker are killed in that salvo, Lithuania would face serious ambiguity over which institution can authoritatively exercise presidential powers, including the chief-of-command role under Article 84 and the constitutionally clearest pathway for collective-defence requests to NATO under Articles 4 and 5. Lithuanian defence law and Government foreign-relations powers provide partial continuity channels in such a scenario, but the absence of a clearly designated successor beyond the Speaker leaves a gap of sufficient seriousness to warrant formal constitutional examination. This is a gap Lithuania must close on Lithuanian terms. The country is small and concentrated — the entire command apparatus sits within a 2-kilometre radius — and chain-of-succession models drawn from larger states may not survive that geography. The recommended next step is a dedicated constitutional study, conducted by a cross-party commission with Venice Commission input, that maps every route by which a single strike can leave Lithuania without an authenticated head of state and designs a succession architecture able to resist all of them. The path forward — which articles to amend, how to extend the chain, what limits to place on an Acting President's authority — is for Lithuanian constitutional scholars and the Seimas to determine.
Codify and Oversight-Harden Fast Defense Procurement
Lithuania already buys defence equipment fast on a case-by-case basis, but has no statute, no central agency, and no anti-corruption guard rails — leaving every minister exposed to a repeat of the 2024 Anušauskas bribery scandal.
On 22 April 2026 the Lithuanian Cabinet authorised the Ministry of Defence to buy 48 Merops AS-3 interceptor drones from Perennial Autonomy by direct award, citing essential security interests (LRT 2906360). Cabinet to contract took about three months — in line with recent NASAMS, AIM-9X and Active Protection System buys. The speed is real, but the legal architecture is not. Each award is improvised, exposed under European Court of Justice rulings requiring Article 346 of the EU Treaty to be used only in narrowly defined cases (C-615/10 InsTiimi, 2012; C-187/16 Commission v Austria, 2018), and politically vulnerable to a repeat of the March 2024 investigation that forced Defence Minister Anušauskas to resign and pulled in MP Lopata and former Deputy Minister Semeška (LRT 2229494). Estonia faced the same problem in 2017 and built the State Defence Investment Centre (RKIK) — a separate agency under its Ministry of Defence with a 7.9 billion euro plan for 2025-2029. This is a gap Lithuania should close on Lithuanian terms. The recommended next step is a cross-party working group, with Venice Commission and European Commission input, examining whether to codify current practice into two parallel bills: a structural bill standing up an RKIK-style central procurement body, and a procedural bill setting tiered single-source thresholds (illustratively 2-5, 25, and 100 million euro brackets), an emergency authority triggered only by State Defence Council high-threat designation, mandatory pre-payment integrity checks by the Special Investigation Service (STT), 90-day vendor re-vetting, public beneficial-ownership disclosure, and explicit links to the NATO Support and Procurement Agency, EDIRPA (310 million euros, 27 member states, three-state minimum), the SAFE loan envelope (150 billion euros, May 2025), and the European Defence Fund (7.3 billion euros). Final design is for Lithuanian legal scholars, the government, and the Seimas to determine.
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