Resilience is now one of the most prominent buzzwords employed across government, industry and defence.
Yet, despite widespread agreement on its importance, there remains far less consensus on what resilience means in practice. From close collaboration with early-stage innovators, government stakeholders, and NATO DIANA, the conclusion has become increasingly clear to me.
True resilience should be defined as operational endurance under disruption.
Warfighting readiness
There has been a substantial momentum generated towards achieving ‘warfighting readiness’ since the publication of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review. For instance, the UK’s pivot to a NATO-first defence policy, which acknowledges that increased collaboration with NATO will be our greatest asset in deterring and combatting modern security threats.
Yet, warfighting readiness can no longer be assessed against the battlefield conditions of the past. Increasingly, adversaries can degrade military effectiveness long before a physical threat emerges through jamming technologies, persistent GPS denial, coordinated cyber strikes and hits on our critical national infrastructure.
In those conditions, even the most advanced platforms can lose their effectiveness unless they are deliberately designed to withstand disruption. A fighter aircraft is only as powerful as the communications, navigation and data systems that support it.
As a result, resilience cannot just be measured by how systems perform in ideal conditions, but by whether military capability can continue to operate when these tactics are successfully employed by our adversaries.
This distinction matters in the context of a real-world push towards warfighting readiness, ensuring broad alignment on a clear standard for innovation that leads to meaningful defence capability. However advanced technologies become, they must continue to function even when the operating environment itself is under attack.
Together, we must consider how defence systems can withstand sustained disruption while maintaining capability when it is needed most. Achieving this will ultimately come down to innovating with new capabilities and bolstering the existing ones by harnessing deep tech innovation emerging across the alliance.
Deep tech innovation is the route to true resilience
Since resilience is measured by the ability to operate through disruption, innovation must focus on the points where modern defence systems are most vulnerable. As military operations become increasingly dependent on data, communications and spectrum access, the electromagnetic environment is now a critical element of resilience.
In turn, the electromagnetic environment has also become an invisible frontline where adversaries can disrupt communications, interfere with navigation systems and conceal emerging threats. It is precisely why Contested Electromagnetic Environments (CEE) have been identified as one of NATO’s priority areas for innovation two years in a row.
Deep tech innovators from across the Alliance are responding to this call with intensity, from real-time radio frequency threat detection and optical LiFi systems that operate without detectable radio emissions, to high-durability protective nanocoatings and alternative navigation platforms that keep forces on track when satellite signals go dark.
We have the technology that can boost our resilience. We now need to step up our capacity to take it into frontline and grey zone capability.
The pace of innovation and technological talent emerging across the Alliance should give us confidence, because the technologies capable of strengthening resilience are already being developed today.
Once continuous operation under fire becomes the standard, not just an ambition, we can then be considered to have passed the true test of resilience.
