Lithuania Failed to Complete 59% of Planned Weapons Procurements in 2025, State Auditors Find

Lithuania is spending record sums on defence, but its buying machinery is not keeping up. That is the finding of the State Audit Office (Valstybės kontrolė), which published its audit of weapons and military equipment purchases on 21 August 2026.

Quick answer: the auditors looked at 2021 to 2025 and found no material breach of procurement law. What they found instead is a system that decides slowly, lets advisory bodies take decisions they have no power to take, and does not monitor almost half of the purchases made under legal exemptions. The Defence Ministry will hand draft laws to the Government this autumn. If you sell to Lithuania's defence sector, the rules you bid under are about to be redrafted.

The audit in five numbers

• 59 percent of planned weapons procurements were not carried through in 2025, up from 24 percent in 2023
• 42 percent of analysed cases took 30 to 374 days of internal coordination before buying could begin
• €3.4 billion in 62 contracts was signed under legal exemptions in 2023 to 2025, 40 percent of all contract value
• 38 percent of the regular procurements reviewed (8 of 21) had significant or medium control deficiencies
• 33 percent growth in the Leopard 2 A8 tank project's value once all concluded and planned contracts were counted

What the audit found

More than half of the purchases Lithuania planned last year never happened. The auditors give four reasons: the army's needs changed, requirements were not ready, suppliers did not submit offers in time, or the prices were higher than the buyer would accept. Two of the four sit on the supplier side. The audit wants the failure rate down to 20 percent.

Buying often stalls before it starts. In 42 percent of the cases analysed, internal coordination alone took between one month and more than a year. The auditors' benchmark for an entire international procurement is 180 to 240 days. They want coordination capped at 35 working days, and the whole path from confirmed need to delivery at 730 days.

The €3.4 billion contracted through legal exemptions was lawful. The auditors say so plainly. Their problem is what happens afterwards: almost half of those purchases are not monitored.

In the regular procurements, the auditors found control weaknesses, not rule-breaking. No violation would have changed a result. But buyers often skipped market research or failed to document it, and 13 of the 16 military capabilities tied to weapons purchases are still being developed under older plans.

For scale: Lithuania signed €8.7 billion of weapons and equipment contracts in 2023 to 2025, weapons went from 14 percent to 40 percent of all defence spending, and this year's defence budget is 5.38 percent of GDP, about €4.8 billion.

Who was actually deciding

Advisory bodies were effectively deciding what to buy, and they were not allowed to. The Defence Resources Council and two other advisory groups took part in 14 of the 31 procurements analysed, and the Defence Resources Agency then acted on their protocol decisions without any legal act from the minister. The auditors' wording is blunt: these bodies "legally have no decision-making powers; their purpose is only to submit proposals and conclusions."

Their members do not declare private interests as procurement participants, because no rule requires them to. Inside the agency, in 53 percent of cases the people involved never recorded their involvement in a specific purchase, and 74 percent of them had written the purchase request themselves.

Auditor General Irena Segalovičienė put the stakes in one sentence: "Today, in defence, time is as critical a resource as funding."

The response

President Gitanas Nausėda said the audit had highlighted "certain systemic things that we must fix."

Former defence minister Dovilė Šakalienė read the same report as a vindication. No significant systemic violations were found, she said, and the real problem is a procurement system built in 2007. She added that the 59 percent includes purchases cancelled because the army's needs changed, which can be the right call, and that the expedited procedures she introduced were about 105 days faster than standard ones. She accepted that some findings are justified.

Current defence minister Robertas Kaunas said the audit confirmed what had been said for years: the system "operated without clear deadlines, without separated responsibilities and without effective monitoring." His ministry's own explanation for the slow pace is not money but industry: "the capacity of many manufacturers is booked several years ahead." It admits some projects have slipped, but will not say which.

The ministry has started reviewing procurement law, begun managing defence procurement data in one system, and made the Defence Resources Agency a central purchasing body. "This autumn the ministry will submit draft laws to the Government that will help make acquisitions more efficient." Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius has said the current pace does not satisfy him, and procurement is to be tracked at Government Chancellery level.

What nobody has published yet: what the draft laws will say, and what Lithuania's updated 2027 defence allocation will be.

What to do now

• Cancelled tender? Check with the original contracting authority whether the requirement is being re-scoped or re-tendered.
• Security or defence CPV code? Check who the buyer is before assuming it is a military opportunity. Only two of the 16 currently open come from Defence Ministry bodies.
• Selling equipment that is hard to get? Have credible capacity and lead-time evidence ready. The Defence Ministry says the main constraint on its spending is now industry capacity and supply chains, with many manufacturers booked years ahead.

Open Tendly to see which Lithuanian tenders match your company today, or let a Strategist expert watch the market for you as the rules change.