How to Prepare a Country for ‘Zero Day’ of Invasion
In a small town, a kindergarten teacher leads an effort to evacuate more than 200 women, children, and older people to a local shelter. Using the training she received before the war, she binds wounds and guides the vulnerable along a practiced evacuation route. In this case, it’s just a training exercise in a town of 1,000 people in southern Estonia—one that’s attracted hundreds of volunteers, nervous about the very real war in nearby Ukraine.
Nearly 5,000 miles away, another group of civilians have signed up for a training course on basic first-aid skills, first-responder management, and evacuation planning. Kuma Academy, the Taiwanese organization providing these skills was created in 2021 to help citizens better prepare to respond to natural disasters. But today, the disaster they anticipate most is an invasion by China. Public interest in training courses surged after Russia’s 2022 full-scale war against Ukraine and remains strong due in part to China’s frequent military exercises. The public is also keenly interested in a forthcoming television series that dramatizes events days before an invasion by China called Zero Day.
Democracies have always struggled with finding the right balance between signaling public confidence through preparation for conflict and instilling fear and panic. Yet as the international security environment grows more ominous, with Russia’s latest attacks on Ukraine and intensifying climate-fueled natural disasters and global pandemics, leaders and collective defense organizations such as NATO are accelerating efforts to enhance societal resilience. During the Cold War, Americans frequently practiced “duck and cover” nuclear drills and Britons made makeshift shelters and distributed first aid; yet the prolonged and relatively tranquil three decades after the end of the war made such preparations seemingly unnecessary and expensive, thus making them de-prioritized and under-funded.
That era is now over. Greater focus on national and collective democratic resiliency is urgently needed, as adversaries not only implant malware within national water, energy, data and health systems but also utilize state and non-state actors to wage crippling cyberattacks that could paralyze response capabilities. Economic coercion, weaponized corruption, political infiltration, and disinformation campaigns—all hybrid warfare tactics—are designed to convince public opinion that resistance to the adversary’s actions is futile. Ukraine has served as a laboratory for these Russian-implemented activities for over two decades—but the rest of Europe hasn’t been spared either. In the Indo-Pacific, China is deploying similar economic coercion and influence operations beyond Taiwan.
Countries under threat on different sides of the world can learn powerful lessons from each other. NATO’s Resilience Committee, for example, an advisory body formed in 2022, monitors, advises on, and coordinates defense planning and activities alongside nationally developed disaster preparedness and resilience plans to counter hybrid attacks.
NATO views resilience as a tenet of both territorial and collective defense, as enshrined in Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty which requires each member to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” The Resilience Committee’s work focuses on six pillars: civic communications, civil protection, energy, food and agriculture, health. and transport.
NATO’s resiliency efforts should be more widely shared with U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. Whole-of-society resilience and lessons learned from the war in Ukraine were leading topics of discussion during a recent visit by the authors to Taiwan (during Typhoon Krathon, no less). Senior officials of the recently inaugurated Lai Ching-te administration, as well as private sector and civil society leaders, stressed the need for more robust national resiliency efforts embodied in Taiwan’s Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience plan, announced on June 19 with the formation of a national implementing committee.
Holding its first interagency committee meeting in September to implement this plan, Lai underscored the need to “enhance Taiwan’s response capabilities and expand cooperation between the public and private sectors.” The role of the private sector within a resilience framework is key. With an initial investment of approximately $26.4 billion, Taiwan’s five resiliency pillars parallel NATO’s: social welfare and medical supplies; material preparations and critical supply distribution systems; civilian forces training and utilization; energy and critical infrastructure security; and information, cyber, transportation, and financial security. Not only would NATO members and Taiwan mutually benefit from a more focused set of information and best practice-sharing, but as the growing potential for both combined and simultaneous Chinese and Russian hybrid activities in the United States, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific intensifies, it will be critical to understand their evolving tactics.
Vulnerabilities vary, but shared experiences are highly useful—especially in drawing attention to aspects of resilience that one group might have overlooked. During recent discussions, Taiwanese officials seemed particularly focused on building greater resilience of its energy supply and grid, the government’s ability to retain communications with all citizens and the outside world (via resistance to Beijing’s cognitive warfare as well as protection of undersea cables, data, and satellite communications), and citizen preparedness (particularly first aid).
Observers of Russia’s relentless missile and drone attacks against Ukraine’s energy sector for the past two years highlight Taiwan’s energy import vulnerabilities and its need for greater energy resilience as Taipei imports nearly 98 percent of its energy needs (including 40 percent of its crude oil needs, 30 percent of its coal and 19 percent of liquified natural gas). China’s recent Joint Sword-2024B military exercise flexed its military muscles by demonstrating how a limited quarantine or blockade of the island and outlying islands could challenge Taiwan’s energy resilience.
The ability to sustain households and fuel its energy-intensive semiconductor economy is critical to sustaining both political will and economic stability. The private sector, in partnership with the public sector, will play a key role in energy resiliency through activities ranging from resisting cyberattacks to the protection of the energy grid and physical plants.
For the past several years, there has been growing global concern about the vulnerability of undersea cables, whose disruption would have profound implications for global financial and communication systems in both the Euro-Atlantic or Indo-Pacific regions. In response, NATO has recently set up a Maritime Center for Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure to better protect these vital economic links. Estonia and Finland faced disruptions after the October 2023 severing of the 48-mile Balticconnector pipeline and undersea cable by a Chinese-owned and Hong Kong-registered cargo vessel in the Baltic Sea which traveled to Russian ports along the Arctic Northern Sea Route.
Although China claimed the incident was an accident caused by a strong storm, Finnish officials declared it a “deliberate external act.” (Restoration of the Baltic connector and undersea cable took six months. One of Taiwan’s outlying island chains, Matsu Islands, has had its undersea cable cut 27 times over the past five years. After a Chinese fishing vessel reportedly severed an undersea cable February 2023, internet linkages took several months to restore. In a limited quarantine scenario, Beijing could sever Taiwan’s communications with these outlying islands, illustrating Taipei’s inability to protect and sustain communications with its citizens. Greater capacity for low-earth-orbiting satellites and use of microwave transmission are also critical to the country’s resiliency and, again, the private sector will play a key role.
An underappreciated element for any national resilience plan is individual citizen preparedness, a lesson that has been learned repeatedly and tragically by the Ukrainian people. According to the head of disaster management at Estonia’s Red Cross, “Ukrainians say that if the population would have known how to use first aid skills, it would have saved many more lives.” From Estonia to Taiwan, citizens are taking a greater interest in learning such life-saving skills, from applying a tourniquet to maintaining the safety of national blood supplies.
While European and Indo-Pacific leaders grapple with combating intensifying Russian and Chinese conventional military and hybrid activities, sustained senior-level engagement with the private sector remains absolutely critical, yet very underdeveloped. As Taipei urgently builds its whole-of-society defense resilience program, it would benefit from creating a high-level private sector advisory council. This would report to Taiwan’s National Security Council to ensure all five working groups are infused with private-sector input and that companies can rapidly implement as well as support the government’s evolving resilience plans.
While individual and multinational firms may have their own cyber and energy resilience plans, protection of vulnerable critical infrastructure would be insufficient in the event of a military intervention. The private sector should engage in regular tabletop exercises with government and civil society leaders to identify gaps and security vulnerabilities, and there should be clear and public timelines to address these shortfalls. Interestingly, the American Chambers of Commerce in Taiwan and Ukraine have, for the first time, exchanged best practices for private-sector resilience—an initiative that should be continued and strengthened by including other important private sector voices from Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and others.
Just as the NATO Resilience Committee was built upon the organization’s existing work on humanitarian and disaster response, government leaders in Taipei could better utilize the Global Cooperation and Training Framework (GCTF) as a vehicle to share best practices on whole-of-society resilience—particularly in areas vital to Ukraine’s resilience that have been under sustained attack, such as connectivity, data protection, and energy resilience. Full partners to the GCTF—Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United States—should prioritize this area alongside partners with rich societal resilience experience, such as the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and, Sweden. These nations can deepen cooperation by increasing and intensifying co-organized workshops in support of Taiwan’s whole-of-society plan. Here again, the private sector should also be invited to participate in these workshops.
National preparation and resilience planning can mitigate the consequences of both natural disasters and conflict. A strong national and collective resiliency plan can go one step further and deter an adversary. Success requires societal unity, citizen engagement, and a robust role for the private sector that can work seamlessly with all levels of governments. Whole-of-society defense resilience, or what Finland calls “total defense,” is one of the most challenging tasks that a democracy can undertake—precisely why adversaries exploits societal divisions. As the saying goes, “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” For the democratic West, resilience is what happens when whole-of-society preparation counters the adversary’s “opportunity.”