The 2024 NATO Resilience Symposium, co-organized by the NATO International Staff Defence Planning and Policy Division and Allied Command Transformation, will be hosted by Slovakia between the 11th and the 13th of November in Bratislava.
The theme for this year’s symposium will be “NATO at 75: Delivering Resilient Deterrence and Defence“.
It will focus on critical aspects of operationalizing resilience in view of the decisions made at the summit in Washington D.C. and previous summits.
In particular, the symposium will address how we can collectively develop and implement resilience planning to underpin credible deterrence and defence of the Alliance.
The report from last year’s symposium can be found here.
NATO RESILIENCE SYMPOSIUM, 25-27 APRIL 2023
This year the NATO Resilience Symposium, co-organized by the NATO International Staff Defence Planning and Policy Division and Allied Command Transformation, took place in Riga, Latvia.
The theme for this year’s symposium was “Resilience in the age of disruption”.
It brought together civilian and military leaders, policy makers and experts with a resilience portfolio to promote resilience as a national responsibility and a collective commitment.
Attendees explored key issues on the resilience agenda to understand them better and decide faster with the aim of reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing our capacity to prepare for, resist, respond to, and quickly recover from strategic shocks and disruptions.
NATO RESILIENCE SYMPOSIUM, 04-06 MAY 2022
The NATO International Staff Defence Planning and Policy Division and Allied Command Transformation co-organized the NATO Resilience Symposium 2022. The symposium was hosted by Polish government in Warsaw, on 4-6 May 2022.
The symposium promoted the Alliance’s collective commitment to resilience by bringing Allied and Partner civilian and military leaders, policy makers and experts together to address key issues on the resilience agenda to reduce our vulnerabilities and ensure that our militaries can operate in peace, crisis, and conflict.
The symposium was held in the context of the war in Ukraine, which was reflected in discussions and conversations throughout the event. The on-going conflict clearly illustrates the impact of resilience on nations and the importance of military resilience in operations. It underpins the requirement for a holistic approach to resilience while acknowledging that resilience is a national responsibility with a collective commitment.
Over 230 people attended the symposium including senior civilian and military leaders from Allied and select Partner nations, NATO, academia and industry.
The Resilience Symposium 2022 report is available here.
Resilience is a society’s ability to resist and recover easily and quickly from shocks.
NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General André Lanata, and the Mayor of the City of Norfolk, Kenneth Alexander, co-hosted a Resilience Conference from April 9th-10th, 2019. The aim of the conference was to increase understanding of civilian/military cooperation in preparing for hybrid/counter-terrorism events.
The Resilience Conference brought together leaders from NATO, European Union nations as well as international experts and policy makers from all levels of government, public and private sectors.
The discussion focussed on a fictitious scenario which included two concurrent terrorist attacks combined with Cyber-attack on a single port city. This allowed the attendees to explore combined civilian, economic, commercial and military factors in order to foster the sharing of best practices between the various stakeholders and explore how NATO best supports nations in building collective resilience.
General André Lanata, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, said, “Each NATO country must be resilient in order to withstand shocks like critical infrastructure failure, military attack and natural disaster.”
He continued: “We serve as the Warfare Development Command, a Command that prepares NATO for every eventuality and provides, by design, end-to-end coherence of the NATO military instrument; and, Resilience is a necessary component of that instrument. When a shocking event occurs, the response must be holistic, systematic and well prepared.”
General Lanata went on to say “In 2016, Allies committed to enhancing resilience. NATO now has seven baseline requirements that assist us in our collective capacity:
Assured continuity of government and critical government services;
Resilient energy supplies;
Ability to deal effectively with uncontrolled movement of people ;
Resilient food and water resources;
Ability to deal with mass casualties;
Resilient civil communications systems;
Resilient civil transportation systems.”
On closing the conference, Admiral Manfred Nielson, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Transformation said, “Resilience is the first line of Defence, and we will only survive in a collaborative effort.”
“We can’t see any future exercise without experimentation, wargaming and testing of interaction”, he added.
Mayor Alexander thanked Allied Command Transformation for bringing “the world to Norfolk” and highlighted the success of the conference for Norfolk. “During this conference we have clearly seen that we have partners who are willing to move with us,” he said.
The conference corresponds with the 70th anniversary of NATO and acts as a reminder of the important role NATO has continually played in supporting and promoting civil preparedness amongst the Alliance and in particular, highlights the role of Allied Command Transformation in ensuring that the Alliance and its Partners are able to recover quickly from adversity now and for another 70 years.
Click here for more info on the Resilience Paper.
The event was covered by WTKR and 13 News Now.
