Baltic military experts, still expert, were perfectly familiar with these well-known circumstances. The Latvians did not therefore plan for more than a token professional army as a sort of inner guiding corps. With the defeat of the Russian coup in August, 1991, they knew that they would be allowed to rebuild a military. Their very first unit of August was the Latvian National Guard, a contingent of citizen-soldiers. They were not first of all outsiders. They would be defending the country in which they were born and raised, nor could any foreign power remove them from there for missions not their own. Second, they were needed to work with civilian authorities for solving domestic problems of security and order. The requirement did not fit the mold of mil-to-mil associations; therefore, they requested an American unit that could work with civilians.