VII. Resilience
7.1. Layered Resilience
The Layered Resilience Concept
The key focus of the concept is on military resilience, and its overall aim is to increase understanding of military resilience and its interdependencies with civil resilience. NATO requires a better understanding of its military resilience, starting with defining it as a layer of the broader alliance resilience, creating an assessment of critical shortfalls and associated risks for the Alliance, and acknowledging and highlighting the reliance of the MIoP on the civil resilience layer.
Figure 7.2 NATO's Layered Resilience
Source: NATO Joint Warfare Centre
Layers of resilience
Because resilience requires successful collaboration between military and civilian stakeholders, an approach considering these two mutually reinforcing layers and their corresponding interdependencies is applied. The understanding derived from this layered analysis is fundamental to a holistic assessment of critical shortfalls and associated risks.
Military Resilience is a key focus for LR to decrease the Alliance's vulnerability to sudden attacks, sustain long campaigns, and support cognitive competition. A successful response requires functional Military Resilience to address military aggression and any cyber, space, hybrid, or cognitive threat, whether short-term or sustained. Military Resilience must reduce vulnerability and maintain NATO's cohesion and security in the current contested environment. Clearly defining Military Resilience is crucial for developing an effective, realistic LRC and will determine the scope of the NATO Military Resilience Risk Assessment.
Civil Resilience involves the ability to adapt and overcome various threats and crises. Civil preparedness is a key component of Civil Resilience and is crucial for the Alliance's Collective Defence. NATO assists its member countries in evaluating their resilience by regularly reviewing the 7BLR, which serves as a benchmark for assessing preparedness levels. The 7BLR provide a road map for civil support to the MloP while ensuring societal function during times of threat or crisis. NATO Civil Preparedness is currently coordinated by International Staff Defence Policy and Planning (IS-DPP) and through the Civil Emergency Planning Committee (CEPC)