Resilience is deterrence and resilience is impossible without partnerships. Credible deterrence rests as much on convincing an adversary that society and governance is robust in the face of threat as credible and legitimate military power. The reverse is also true.
NATO Allies and Partners will not be able to project the demonstrable power future defence and deterrence of open societies will demand unless open societies are first and foremost resilient and able to manage very robust consequences. The Future Defence, Deterrence and Resilience Working Conference will therefore address two critical questions:
- How do we define resilience?
- What and who needs to be resilient to maintain credible deterrence going forward?
Given the core premise of the conference, the relationship between resilience, deterrence and defence must be seen to extend across economic, energy, institutional, informational, energy, and political and societal security. Partnerships in deterrence and resilience are thus the very ethos of the conference.
The challenge of resilience concerns the sheer range of factors that underpin a nation’s overall resilience. Therefore, this dialogue will focus on enhancing protection of those vulnerable areas of governance and society which an adversary would most likely to seek to exploit to coerce and threaten via covert or open aggression. Such attacks could be on communications and energy nodes, critical infrastructure, continuity of government, cyber defences, or military mobility-related transportation nodes and targeting susceptibilities to disinformation and propaganda.
In partnership with
