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It will not be lost on anyone the importance of following official guidance at a time when authorities are issuing urgent alerts on public safety.
The danger to society during wartime lies in disregarding the messaging when the incoming dangers trigger “take cover” instructions. What is crucial now, therefore, is the ability of a population to “absorb, accommodate to and recover” from attacks of whatever stripe.
Resilience can, and should, be the new lifelong learning. This need is driven by the changing world that has become dangerous, where the mode of international affairs is set more often to attack. The trend towards multilateral co-operation, which was established after the Cold War ended, is unfortunately long in the rear-view mirror.
Getting ahead of the dangers offers the practical advantage of possessing coping mechanisms that were previously unthinkable. It helps that we can harness technological change that makes so many more tools available to the country’s critical national infrastructure.
Over the previous decade, specialists in civil defence have been getting more of a hearing in security and strategic affairs. As the British academics Jon Coaffee and Paul O’Hare noted, resilience had already morphed from issues around flooding and other nature-based events into mass terror attacks in the early years of this century.
As global confrontations develop in scale and range, governments and the military will need to work together to ensure that “potentially devastating stresses can be repelled, resisted or redressed”, as the two academics put it.
There needs to be a two-way conversation between officials and the people the world over. In the UAE this month, the alarm from the phone alerts was tweaked in real time. The “all clear” was changed from the initial alert and the tone was adjusted during the night-time hours to ensure a softer impact.
Skills in resilience can be learnt quickly. Taking a longer-term approach, these can be embedded in societies as residents and citizens are taught in organised formats how to develop response mechanisms to protect not just themselves but the wider community around them.
Europeans were jolted by the invasion of Ukraine to consider how societies should react to crises and emergency conditions. Some of the measures may have reminded them of the Cold War days, but this is just the kernel of a trend that has a whole-of-society feel. For example, France last year introduced laws for a new form of national service a quarter century after phasing it out. This is mainly aimed at mobilising 18-19-year-olds.
Scandinavia is much further down the track of what is required. Sweden has national volunteer service that lies at the heart of a revamped civil defence and resilience agency. The Finnish government says the country’s people “play a significant role in providing everyday security”.
The corporate sector globally also has a role to play in preparing its employees for crisis situations. Already, there are practices that could be built on, such as the corporate crisis management exercises focused on threats to businesses that could become more strategic exercises within a national framework.
There is a cost to not getting to grips with external threats that society cannot predict but can foresee. For instance, the cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover last year cost the UK-based car manufacturer more than £2 billion ($2.65 billion). As an example of what is at stake when defences are breached, this incident is a good demonstration of why it is worth investing in preparations for the worst happening.
The researcher Elisabeth Braw suggested four broad pillars of involving civilians with defence networks in a paper for the Rusi think tank a few years ago. It suggested that the priorities should be national security; crisis preparedness; crisis response and information literacy.
These are clear and well delineated – two vital attributes of getting a societal response that functions well and has good buy-in for the population as a whole. All ages can be involved, as can private and public sector operations.
The mobile phone has been a vital tool for the UAE in recent weeks as it faces aggression from its neighbour. Looking at the development capabilities of agentic AI, the infrastructure of civilian resilience can only be built on and improved. If in everyone’s pocket, there is a system of alerts, there is a chance to roll out a system that develops response and coping tools with relative ease.
Face-to-face training, corporations that design modes of mobilisation, schools that integrate early-year skills and local nodes of resilience operations are some of the pillars of best practice that can be adopted. Undoubtedly, the actual shape of resilience institutions and systems will vary widely between countries.
The good news is that good practices can be integrated into homes, workplaces and social spaces. All it takes for them to succeed are a good design and positive engagement.
All of which is important, because there is no avoiding the need for everyone to join what the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke called “the little platoons of a strong society”.
