The town doesn't have a name yet, but its buildings are
nearly finished and its roads are all laid out. Yet nobody will ever
call it home.
Worried by an increasingly militarist Russia next door, Lithuania is
putting the finishing touches to the dummy settlement in the Pabrade
training area so it can teach its soldiers how to fight in towns and
villages.
The first such facility in the Baltic states, it is seen as a
symbol of how seriously those countries now view the threat from
Russia, their former overlord.
The largest of the three Baltic nations, Lithuania only
started taking defense seriously in 2014, when Russia annexed the
Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. Vilnius is now increasing defense spending
by about a third every year, the highest rate in the NATO alliance.
Lithuania will spend 725 million euros on defense in 2017,
about 1.8 percent of its economy and almost as much as it spent in the
three years from 2011 to 2013.
"This has made our country more defendable, and deterrence
against potential enemies has increased," defense minister Juozas Olekas
told Reuters.
In 2013, Lithuania spent only about 0.8 percent of its gross
domestic product on defense, far below the unofficial NATO threshold of
2 percent. Only Luxemburg spent less.
Since 2014, Lithuania expanded its armed forces, partly by
reintroducing conscription, and armed it with modern weapons, including
anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Training areas are being updated
and will double in size and capacity by 2022.
Although the new town in the Pabrade training area doesn't
yet have a name, the road sign at its entrance says Vilnius, the capital
of Lithuania.
Built at a cost of almost 5 million euros, the village has
26 brick two-storey houses around large central square, including a
police station, a bus station with a shopping center, a schoolyard with a
full-sized soccer field, and a high-vaulted church.
"It wouldn't be a Lithuanian village without a church in it,
would it?” says Captain Nerijus Rocevicius, commandant of the Pabrade
training area.
Fighting In SewersAn underground sewer has been installed so soldiers can practice fighting below street level.
"Unlike in the movies, the enemy will shot at not only from
windows but also from up above and from down below," said Rocevicius.
More than a thousand troops at a time will hone their
defense and attack skills here, supported by tanks and armored vehicles.
Lamp-posts, benches and rubbish bins line signposted streets, and
windows are boarded up to simulate wartime conditions.
Pretend town-dwellers – policemen, children, distressed
citizens – will be present in July, when the military plans its first
exercise. A similar town will be built in another Lithuanian training
facility in 2019.
A close-quarters range, where soldiers use live ammunition
to shoot dummies hiding in a maze of small rooms and corridors, is
already in use.
Lithuania wants to show it is playing its part when it asks
NATO allies at a summit in Warsaw in July to send more troops to the
Baltic region to keep it safe from Russia.
Two of the U.S. Air Force's most advanced jets landed in
Lithuania on Wednesday in a show of support for a region worried by
Russian military maneuvers.
The Baltic states and Washington have been angered by Russian
warplanes making "simulated attack passes" near a U.S. warship and
another passing close to a U.S. reconnaissance plane.A study by the RAND Corporation, a U.S. defense think-tank, said Russia could overrun Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in three days, leaving NATO and the United States with no good options to respond.
About seven brigades, three of them heavily armored, would be needed to prevent this, the study found.
Lithuania is worried by Russia's so called anti-access area denial (A2/AD) capability, by which it could keep out reinforcements by using missiles, submarines and other forces from its Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania.
This is something the alliance knows it must deal with, outgoing NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Philip Breedlove said last month in Vilnius.
"We have the capability, but we probably need to work on our capacity to address A2/AD", he told reporters.
"This is not unique to Kaliningrad, it's happening in
the Black Sea, it's happening in the Eastern Mediterranean and other
places along NATO's periphery. And so as an alliance we need to be able
to deal with A2/AD, as it would constrain any of our future options,"
Breedlove said.
Lithuania accounts for less than one-thousandth of NATO's
total spending and last year the country's defense budget was about 140
times smaller than Russia's.
Annexed by the Soviet Union in the 1940s, the three Baltic
nations regained their independence in the 1990s and wasted little time
in joining NATO and the European Union.
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