Resilience is a “new” term creeping into military directives, but what does it mean and how do we use it to guide decisions? In the previous resilience corner, we discussed how resilience should be differentiated from established notions of risk as the two concepts are fundamentally different. Resilience is more like a verb than a noun, and resilient military systems should be designed to handle any possible problem instead of only pre-defined threat scenarios. But how do we start approaching this problem of resilient design when we cannot define specific threats?
In a recent article published in the journal Risk Analysis, we answered this question by relying on military theories of surprise (Eisenberg et al. 2019).
