It is time to develop and deploy a comprehensive, national level, whole of society resilience planning framework, planning activity and exercising schedule that involves government, industry, charities and relevant NGOs from conception and at every stage through to implementation. This national level activity needs to take into account partner nation plans and NATO-level resilience planning policy/doctrine as well as the associated obligations stemming from both. These conclusions lead to a host of recommendations regarding strategic PPPs as follows.
- Allies and partners learn from each other by strengthening international engagement with front line states (using Ukraine, Latvia/Finland/Sweden/Estonia as exemplars) and those such as France that have recently conducted a 4* sponsored Resilience Audit.
- Leverage the alliance as a School of Resilience.
- Involve industry and other stakeholders from the start of planning and cast the net wide by stressing the corporate social responsibility of involvement (and the financial benefits of being ready for a resilience shock).
- Reach out to critical industries, government departments, local authorities, charities and NGOs.
- Ensure that larger businesses look hard at their supply chains and invite those deemed critical to the table. Recommend appointment of a designated Chief Resilience Officer at senior level of companies.
- Run training/planning exercises and conferences with government stakeholders to build out a network of resilience leads across government and industry and share findings with Allies and partners through the EU and NATO.
Set up the right behaviours to build a partnership of equals. There are already good examples of such partnerships of equals to learn from. These include the UK Defence Nuclear Enterprise and Aircraft Carrier Alliance as well as unmanned aerial systems (UAS) procurement for Ukraine across NATO nations. Such partnerships must be built on principles.
- Lead with empathy and listening along with a focus on the culture and values of the partnership.
- Recognise incentives and disincentives; commercial profit and commercial interests can align with resilience needs of the government.
- Educate each other on individual motivations, fears and desired outcomes to build trust.
- Recognise the limitations in labelling contractors and/or actors – not every actor required to engage on resilience is a current contractor and contractors need to recognise they are wider actors (and carry increased responsibility in the resilience space).
Build on Specialist Reserves and scale them up to a greater level across infrastructure, cyber and utilities resilience and redundancy. There are pockets of specialist reserve services already, but they need to be at national level and forged in planning and policy with both NATO and the EU to ensure consistency and considered escalation in response to established indicators as crises evolve. Direct industry to deliver against an escalating Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as the civil defence situation deteriorates. Such a planning and metrics approach would allow businesses to plan and provide assurances that governments will pay them for their time when they activate this service and pay more as each bespoke SLA becomes more onerous on an industrial partner. Measure the readiness of businesses by creating an annual quality assurance audit on companies.
Devise new legislation and policies on resilience, possibly built on the experience of Dutch readiness/resilience laws. Leadership will be vital. Someone needs to own resilience at a national level, departmental level and industrial level. To that end, assign leaders for each nation and for each business and government department. To promote affordability, options must be crafted to ensure there is money and it is spent on the right things to reinforce resilience. Create escrow accounts with more than one stakeholder access and multi-stakeholder approval.
Establish a binding Joint National Resilience Contingency Fund between governments and industry. A National Resilience Tax Scheme could be examined, although it would have to be seen as a structural tax, much like VAT and not as a windfall to ensure it did not have a counter-productive impact on investment. Create a comprehensive communications plan that targets multiple audiences with tailored messages to support a genuinely public private partnership with all stakeholders.
Make the economic case for resilience. There is a genuine economic case for investment in resilience as an essential element of sound national infrastructure that attracts (and retains) long-term structural investment and defrays the down-side risk associated with rapid flights of capital that occur when crises hit unprepared states. Soliciting investment from industry beyond their own fiduciary duties will require open sharing of what risks are being secured against, where government will own contingency and how that contingency will be made available to the private sector, both in planning for resilience and in activating capability and capacity as a crisis unfolds.