STAVANGER, Norway – NATO Joint Warfare Centre’s (JWC) Transformation Delivery Division (TDD) recently held a deep dive event with the University of Stavanger (UiS) faculty members specialized in risk management and societal safety to increase awareness on resilience and strategic thinking.
The deep dive event was the culmination of a week-long internal training and team building primarily for the TDD staff but it was also designed for and open to all of JWC.
Today national and collective resilience is among the most critical enablers in NATO’s collective defence. Discussions during the event underscored that partnerships between the military, government organizations, international organizations, industry, and academia were crucial for advancing civil preparedness and response in peace, crisis and conflict.
NATO defines resilience as “the individual and collective capacity to prepare for, resist, respond to and quickly recover from shocks and disruptions, and to ensure the continuity of the Alliance’s activities.” At the operational and strategic levels, the JWC primarily focuses on the Layered Resilience Concept, which considers military and civil resilience as two layers necessary to support the military instrument of power.
The deep dive, which kicked off on August 30, included lectures by the University of Stavanger faculty members, as well as a presentation on the Layered Resilience Concept by the JWC’s Lieutenant Colonel and HQ SACT doctorate candidate, Jeroen Van Mill. The faculty members from the UiS are some of the leading scientists in the field of societal safety.
The latter part of the event included facilitated discussions covering topics such as crisis prevention and management, cooperative security, and the key role of civil-military cooperation in addressing contemporary security challenges.
Van Mill noted that the deep dive was a great opportunity not only for the JWC’s functional experts, but also for the entire workforce, who is committed to making NATO better every day. “The movement toward resiliency is a process and will not be done overnight,” he said, adding: “Building a resilient organization is a complex cross functional ‘one team’ endeavour, which needs cross disciplinary efforts of people inside and outside our organization.”
Van Mill underlined that the collaborative effort between the JWC and UiS was a step forward in establishing a network of resilience-focused experts, researches, and practitioners in Norway.
“This has been a great and highly engaging learning experience. We learned from the faculty, but we also helped them to get a better understanding of NATO’s military resilience concept, how the JWC supports it, and its strategic relevance to our collective security. Resilience requires a whole of government approach, but it also helps increase our interoperability since it strengthens the partnership between our nations,” Van Mill added.
The higher education representatives attending the JWC’s deep dive event included Associate Professor Dr Claudia Morsut, who provided a lecture on resilience in complex multinational organizations, such as the UN and EU; and Professor and former Norwegian Armed Forces Officer Dr Bjørn Ivar Kruke, who provided a lecture on emergency preparedness. Additionally, Professor Sissel H. Jore delivered presentations during the event and participated in the discussions.
At the conclusion of the deep dive, Professor Kruke said: “Joint Warfare Centre has a huge body of competence for operationalizing the difficult resilience concept into a applicable framework for NATO.”
