The Lithuanian government is not keeping to the Armed Forces’ expansion plans agreed on earlier this year, Kęstutis Budrys, President Gitanas Nausėda’s chief national security adviser, said on Tuesday.
According to Budrys, the National Defence System Development Program tabled by the government to the parliament is not in line with the decisions adopted by the State Defence Council, which is chaired by the president and includes the prime minister, the speaker of the parliament, the defence minister, and the chief of defence.
“We talked about 2030 as a deadline by which the forces must be ready, whatever their size, for full operational capability, which means that they can go and fight, have enough reserves, and can hold out for a certain number of days,” Budrys told the Žinių Radijas radio station.
“Based on this, the State Defence Council adopted the decision to additionally expand the Land Force to a division and allocate extra funds for that purpose,” the presidential adviser said.
“And now, when we look at the draft [National Defence System Development] program that the Defence Ministry has come up with and that has been endorsed by the government, we see that none of this remains. The necessary funding is not there. [Defence spending] remains at 2.52 percent of GDP, and we are sticking to the development of the capacities that we already identified earlier, and what’s more, they have been pushed back beyond 2030, to 2033-2035,” Budrys added.
It is also surprising that the government is reluctant to support the president’s proposal to provide for the possibility for the state to borrow funds next year to bring the defence budget up to 3 percent of GDP, according to the adviser.
Currently, the government suggests allocating 2.71 percent of GDP to defence in 2024, with 2.52 percent coming from the state budget, and the rest from the so-called “solidarity contributions” by banks.
Budrys said he expects that the Seimas Committee on National Security and Defence will not approve either next year’s draft state budget or the National Defence System Development Program currently under consideration in the parliament.
“I cannot imagine how the committee could approve the current drafts,” he said.
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