In the event of an armed attack against Lithuania, resistance will require a well-coordinated effort. The State Defence Council (VGT) has approved a plan of how it should work – but politicians, businesses, and NGOs say there is still a lot of work to be done for it to be more than a useless piece of paper.
The Lithuanian Constitution states that it is the right and duty of every citizen to defend the State of Lithuania against foreign armed attack. The authorities, in turn, have a duty to prepare the population for such an eventuality.
“It will not happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow we would like every citizen of the Republic of Lithuania to know his or her place and function in times of war,” Kęstutis Budrys, chief adviser to the president, told LRT TV.
Further reading
The National Defence Plan, drafted by the President’s Office and approved by VGT on Monday, outlines the tasks not only for the armed forces and paramilitary organisations, but also for civil servants, non-governmental organisations, and businesses.
“These companies may not be defined as strategic at the moment – they can be companies operating in transport, logistics, or production. A bakery can be just as important as a port handling company,” according to Budrys.
Therefore, companies that think their services may be needed in the event of a war should contact the municipal authorities where they operate and ask for instructions, Budrys said.
You cannot stockpile food
The plan, though long overdue, is only a first step, the Lithuanian Business Confederation says. According to its president Andrius Romanovskis, it is not enough to tell companies: when the time comes, we will need you.
“For companies, from retail chains to banking or IT companies, they need to know which people will be called up to the armed resistance, which people will have to perform certain functions in times of martial law, but perhaps not necessarily in times of active hostilities,” says Romanovskis.
For example, for the manufacturing industry, especially in the food sector, it is very important to know the expectations of the government – and how the companies should prepare to meet them. Stockpiling food in advance, Romanovskis notes, is not feasible.
“A company can make sure it will be able to function: have power generators, supplies, a rough idea of the situation in which it will have to act. But how much to produce, what to do – it is impossible to do prepare without the government’s involvement,” according to Romanovskis.
Hospitals need generators
The role of hospitals in any conflict will be crucial and the National Defence Plan dedicates much attention to medical facilities. However, district hospitals say there is now corresponding concern that they need to be adequately resourced.
“We just made lists of what we would need to prepare for one event or another: what kind of equipment, reserve energy sources, water provisions, food, etc. So we filled out these questionnaires, and that’s the end of it for now,” says Vygantas Sudaris, head of the Association of District Hospitals.
Hospitals are preparing on their own, he says, by stockpiling drugs and making arrangements to have access to drinking water. “Some hospitals have their own generators, some have partial supply because of their capacity.”
NGOs also have a role to play in the National Defence Plan. However, they complain that they have not been sufficiently involved in developing the plan, despite having experience and knowledge to offer.
“Without waiting for any specific guidelines, although we would like to, because it would just be easier, we are preparing and setting ourselves a strategic goal that no matter what the disaster, the Red Cross is committed to helping 10 percent of the Lithuanian population,” says Luka Lesauskaitė of the Lithuanian Red Cross.
The Red Cross is stockpiling food, clothing, blankets, and tents. The organisation also regularly holds exercises both with other institutions and within the organisation to consider different scenarios.
“If there is no internet, how will we communicate with each other? If our logistics centre, our warehouse is in Vilnius, it is probably not a very good place if we want to help the rest of Lithuania, and we need to look for warehouses somewhere else. That is what we are doing,” explains Lesauskaitė.
Where are the warehouses?
Conservative MP Laurynas Kasčiūnas, who chairs the Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defence (NSGK), welcomes the president’s National Defence Plan and says he hopes it will not end up in a drawer.
However, the politician says that there is still not enough awareness that defence is not only the concern of the military and national political leaders.
“Local authorities need to understand that security is their business too. Because, for example, the evacuation of people [...] is an extremely important task, and you cannot do it without local authorities,” says Kasčiūnas.
Municipalities say they do not shirk their responsibilities and that the tasks assigned to them, such as ensuring water supply, garbage management, and so on, are understandable. But not everything in the plan is so clear.
“For example, one area where the responsibility lies with the municipality, the Agriculture Ministry, and the Chancellery of the Government is to ensure the supply of food. Well, it is not entirely clear to me how this is supposed to work. Where are the food warehouses, where are we going to get the food from, how are we going to distribute it?” asks Mindaugas Sinkevičius, president of the Association of Lithuanian Municipalities.
According to him, the prepared plan is better than no plan, but he doubts it will be successfully implemented.
“If there is only a plan, a document with nice theses, well-arranged areas of responsibility, but no funding for it, no human resources – then the plan remains just that,” he says.
We should have been ready yesterday
Funding may be the fundamental flaw in the president’s plan, concedes opposition MP Dovilė Šakalienė. Another problem, she believes, is that the authorities are only starting to prepare when they should already be ready.
“It seems to me that we are still not fully aware of how quickly we need to be ready and how realistically we need to be ready. We have a recurrent, systemic flaw in our country today – we fail to prepare for challenges before they happen,” says Šakalienė.
“The military has a saying that plans are useless, planning is priceless,” says Budrys, senior adviser to the president.
To ensure that the National Defence Plan does not remain but a piece of paper, a National Coordination Council for Global Defence is to be set up under the President’s Office, he notes. It should supervise how individual sectors and institutions are preparing to implement the plan.
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