Executive Summary
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.
The Problem
Lithuania's 2026 defence budget is 4.79 billion euros, 5.38 percent of GDP, with a weapons envelope of about 1.7 billion. The Iran war of March-April 2026 — 39 days, roughly 5.6 weeks of active fighting — drained Western missile and interceptor stocks and reset the supply-shock baseline for any frontline NATO state. Lithuania's response has been ad-hoc fast contracting: Merops interceptors approved in April 2026, additional NASAMS for 234 million euros, AIM-9X missiles for 214 million dollars under the United States Foreign Military Sales programme, and an Active Protection System buy — all closed in roughly three to six months. The institutional scaffolding behind those decisions is improvised. There is no central defence-investment agency. Emergency direct-award authority is exercised one Cabinet meeting at a time. There is no public pre-approved vendor registry, no embedded STT oversight, no beneficial-ownership transparency, and no continuous re-vetting cycle. Earlier drafts proposed quarterly Article 346 test buys to keep the emergency machinery warm; the European Court of Justice has now twice ruled (InsTiimi 2012, Commission v Austria 2018) that calendared use of Article 346 is unlawful. That design has therefore been removed.
Three gaps. First, institutional: Lithuania spends roughly 1.08 times Estonia's annual defence-procurement volume yet has no equivalent of the Estonian State Defence Investment Centre (RKIK, founded 2017). Second, statutory: every Merops-style direct award is re-litigated case by case, with no codified scope, signature rules, or oversight cadence — the 2024 government draft Law on Defence and Security Industry and amendments to the Law on Public Procurement in the Field of Defence and Security are already in the Seimas pipeline (kam.lt), and any reform should dock with that work, not duplicate it. Third, anti-corruption: after the 2024 Anušauskas-Lopata-Semeška investigation, any acceleration without explicit STT embedded oversight, pre-payment integrity checks, and 90-day vendor re-vetting recreates the political attack vector that brought down the previous defence minister.
Without action: Without codification, every fast award reopens the Article 346 question and exposes ministers to a repeat of 2024. Lithuania remains unable to dock cleanly with the NATO Support and Procurement Agency, EDIRPA (310 million euros, 27 member states, three-state minimum), the SAFE loan regulation (150 billion euros, adopted May 2025), or the European Defence Fund (7.3 billion euros over the current budget cycle). The earlier Polish PGZ comparator was inverted in prior drafts: the Piorun-from-Sweden deal took roughly six months from letter of intent (March 2025) to contract (September 2025) — not seven days — and is not a rapid model.
Lithuanian Context
Lithuania's central position in the Suwałki corridor and its 2026 defence budget of 4.79 billion euros (5.38 percent of GDP, weapons envelope around 1.7 billion) make procurement architecture a strategic question, not a technical one. President Macron's 2 March 2026 Île Longue speech named partner countries for the French extended-deterrence conversation — Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, plus the United Kingdom at Northwood — and the Baltic states were absent from that list, though not explicitly excluded. The Treaty of Nancy, signed by Poland and France on 9 May 2025, with the Tusk-Macron Gdansk follow-up of 20 April 2026, deepened a Polish-French bilateral track that does not yet include Lithuania. A codified procurement architecture that docks cleanly with NSPA, EDIRPA, SAFE, and the European Defence Fund is the most direct way for Lithuania to become a more useful alliance member, even if it does not by itself change the Île Longue list.