Lithuanians are engaging in a lot of hand-wringing over security matters these days.

Last year’s installment of “Vlad and Dima do Georgia”, a seriously flawed but nonetheless moderately successful military adventure, has etched fear in the minds of many here, and it has some people wondering if the Kremlin isn’t doing a bit of location scouting for the inevitable crappy sequel.

President Obama’s controversial scrubbing of missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic caused a few Lithuanian politicians and analysts to cry appeasement.

This autumn also saw Belarusian and Russian troops hold massive Soviet-style military maneuvers within spitting distance of Vilnius. Those exercises were named Zapad (West).

This led President Dalia Grybauskaitė to call on NATO to get off its duff and come up with a plan for a defense of the Baltic states from what she obliquely called “new threats.”

Western officials usually express polite dismay at any suggestion the Baltic trio would be left high and dry in the unlikely event of rickety Russian tanks creaking into Vilnius, Riga, or Tallinn.

Why, they say, would Russia risk aggression against even the tiniest NATO country? It would have to be crazy or stupid, or both.

Russia is more bark than bite, some also suggest: its military is rotting (it truly is), its lopsided resource economy bites (very badly), and it has a colossal mess to deal with at home (HIV pandemic, alcoholism epidemic, corruption epidemic, infrastructure decay, internal strife in the Caucasus region…. the list runs on).

But with each passing month Russia is looking hazier and crazier, and not all actors on the international stage are necessarily rational.

Lithuania’s current defense strategy seems to run as follows: Dear NATO (well, we really mean you America), we’ll do some crowd control in the more placid parts of Afghanistan and if the Red Army shows up at our border back home you guys hotfoot it over, guns blazing. Deal?

It strikes me as a bit unwise to bet the farm on an alliance with one country, and, really, with one wing of that country – the kookified Republican right, which consists these days of the richest 1 percent of Americans, the guns-‘n-Jesus Palinites, Fox News, a few ragtag big-stick Straussians (Leo, not Richard), assorted Wall Street financial rapists and free racketeers, and the hard-bitten East European over-75 émigré set.

A stark and disturbing truth is that if the Red Army’s rust buckets were ever to invade Lithuania, there would be a gap of several weeks before NATO mobilized its forces and began a Baltic rescue operation (regardless of who’s sitting in the White House).

This brings to mind a 2007 interview with Algirdas Kanauka, a Lithuanian-American who has lectured at Lithuania’s military academy. (It appeared in Pasaulio Lietuvis, a small-circulation émigré journal).

“There’s a lot of talk about NATO Article Five which says your enemy is our enemy and we’ll defend you. But for some reason we don’t talk about Article Three which says that each state is responsible for maintaining a force capable of defending against an armed attack.”

That’s a bingo, Major Kanauka (US Air Force, retired).

According to Kanauka, Lithuania needs a proper territorial army (in addition to its standing professional force for NATO deployment, he underscores). This means a large reserve force made up of men and women who would attend an intensive training course once in their lives, with the odd refresher later on.

It’s called the porcupine defence: a mass of quickly deployable and highly mobile reservists who know their turf as only locals do, and whose sole focus is disrupting an enemy advance with lots of deadly accurate sniper fire, guerrilla tactics and diversions, tank traps, and anti-tank and anti-aircraft ordinance. Let’s not forget that the Georgians managed to shoot down Russian aircraft without even trying.

In fact as this national reserve acquires new skills and weapons, and as its ethos becomes rooted in the country’s psyche, it becomes capable of wreaking such havoc and inflicting so much damage on the much larger aggressor that the aggressor decides it’s wiser to crawl back into its lair and go to sleep. See Finland.

Plus, says Kanauka, it doesn’t cost all that much, comparatively speaking.

For the price of one fighter jet, let’s say, NATO could contribute towards arming and training large numbers of Lithuanian reservists, making everyone happy.

A territorial army would also go far towards boosting the morale of ordinary Lithuanians who are, in these dark and dreary days, a downcast lot. Reserve training could add meaning to the lives of many frustrated, unemployed young people. Recent numbers show that about one-third of 16-25 year olds in this country are twiddling their thumbs.

Lithuania’s defense minister, Rasa Juknevičienė, has made a glancing reference to such a force in the recent past. It’s high time to follow through.

Kudos to Dalia Grybauskaitė: that one photo where she appears in combat fatigues and is seen cradling a big gun was a powerful riposte to the bare-chested machismo of Mr. Putin in the current propaganda wars.

Photos and pronouncements are great, but action too is needed.

Disclaimer:

Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.