Executive Summary
France's Institute of Higher National Defence Studies (IHEDN, Paris, founded 1936) runs a roughly 30-week senior course producing about 120 graduates per year drawn from ministries, business, journalism, and academia. The United Kingdom's Royal College of Defence Studies, the United States National Defense University, and the NATO Defense College in Rome serve a similar function: a year-long room where the country's next strategic decision-makers learn defence together and stay in contact afterwards. Lithuania has the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy for junior officers, the Baltic Defence College in Tartu for mid-career joint command-and-staff training, and the Vilnius University TSPMI faculty for academic policy work. The senior civil-military pipeline is the gap. The recommended next step is a feasibility study by the Ministry of National Defence with Seimas and academic input: scope, faculty model, alumni-network design, fit with BALTDEFCOL and Žemaitis, and funding scale within the 2026 defence budget of 4.79 billion euros. Whether the right form is a standalone institute, an expanded Žemaitis senior wing, or a Baltic-shared programme is for Lithuania to determine.
The Problem
Total defence requires CEOs, mayors, hospital directors, utility managers, editors, and senior civil servants to act in concert with the armed forces under wartime conditions. Ukraine since February 2022 shows that civilian leaders without prior defence literacy lose weeks learning the basics of mobilisation, logistics, and chain of command while the country is under fire. Lithuania's current civilian leadership has no shared strategic-defence formation comparable to what IHEDN, RCDS, or NDU produce.
The Žemaitis Academy trains junior officers; BALTDEFCOL trains mid-career officers from the three Baltic states on joint command and staff work; TSPMI produces academic security analysis. None of these is a senior cross-sector programme that puts a future Seimas committee chair, a utility CEO, a hospital director, a regional governor, and a brigade commander in the same room for several months. That cohort effect is what the foreign reference institutes are built to produce.
Lithuanian Context
Lithuania is small enough that one or two well-designed senior cohorts per year would touch most of the strategic leadership class within a decade. The risk is the inverse: a thinly resourced programme becomes a sinecure, or the best graduates are recruited away to EU institutions and NATO HQ. Programme reputation will track faculty quality and alumni-network density, not building prestige. Coordination with BALTDEFCOL Tartu and the Žemaitis Academy is essential to avoid duplication.