Executive Summary
Drones without warheads are cameras with wings; artillery shells without explosive fill are inert metal. European Union shell output was near 300,000 rounds per year before 2022 and reached about two million in 2025 with help from the Act in Support of Ammunition Production, a 500 million euro instrument launched in 2023. Critical inputs — TNT, RDX, HMX — remain concentrated in plants in France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Czechia, and Bulgaria. Lithuania has no military-explosives prime; the closest capability is at Forcit Lithuania, a commercial-explosives joint venture. Sovereign warhead capacity is capital-intensive and safety-regulated: greenfield permitting runs 18 to 36 months and exclusion zones reach two kilometres. The recommended next step is a feasibility study by the Ministry of National Defence with the Defence Materiel Agency and a European prime, examining whether the right move is a domestic plant, a Lithuanian joint venture, an offtake stake in Estonia's Rheinmetall 155mm programme, or a drone-warhead-fill cell. The choice is for Lithuania to determine.
The Problem
Russia is producing the UMPB-5R and KAB glide bombs at a planned rate near 75,000 units per year (RUSI 2025), launched 130 to 200 kilometres from Belarusian airfields. Iskander-M and Iskander-K strikes on Ukrainian ammunition depots in 2024-2025 repeatedly destroyed months of Western deliveries in single nights. The 39-day Iran war of March-April 2026 showed how fast modern stockpiles collapse: Gulf Cooperation Council Patriot PAC-3 inventories were reportedly drawn down by roughly 86 percent in five and a half weeks of sustained operations. Lithuania's drone and artillery programmes depend on imported explosive fills and finished warheads from a small number of European plants that are themselves backlogged supplying Ukraine.
No Lithuanian facility produces military-grade explosive fills (TNT, RDX, HMX, Composition B, PBX) or assembles drone warheads at scale. Forcit Lithuania makes commercial mining and quarrying explosives, not military fills. Lithuania's announced drone-production targets — tens of thousands of first-person-view (FPV) units per year — imply matching warhead demand that today is met entirely by imports subject to allied export controls, prioritisation for Ukraine, and shipping disruption.
Lithuanian Context
Lithuania's 2026 defence budget is 4.79 billion euros (5.38 percent of GDP), with a weapons envelope of roughly 1.7 billion euros. A warhead-fill or shell-loading line is technically achievable inside that envelope, but siting is hard: exclusion zones of two kilometres are difficult in a country of 65,000 square kilometres with concentrated population, and any plant becomes a high-value Russian targeting node. A regional approach — co-investment in Estonia's Rheinmetall line, a Forcit Lithuania military-fill expansion, or a Polish partnership under the May 2025 Treaty of Nancy framework even though Lithuania is not party — may yield faster capacity than a sovereign greenfield build.