NATO Resilience Reference Curriculum

NATO launches the Resilience Reference Curriculum

From NATO:

At a meeting of its Resilience Committee on 14 February 2025, NATO introduced its first Resilience Reference Curriculum (RRC) to support efforts by NATO Allies and partners to strengthen their resilience against military and non-military threats and challenges to the Alliance’s security and to their own national security. These can include natural disasters, disruption of critical infrastructure, or hybrid or armed attacks.

The curriculum contributes to developing skills and strategies to enhance resilience in an era of uncertainties, disruptions, interdependence, and technological advancements. It also offers a structured approach to understanding resilience and its critical role in national and collective security.

The development of the Resilience Reference Curriculum was a collaborative effort amongst NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP), NATO’s Resilience Section, and the Partnership for Peace Consortium and featured contributions by experts from Allied and partner countries. In their foreword to the curriculum, Mr. Angus Lapsley, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning, and Admiral Pierre Vandier, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, emphasised the importance of resilience education, stating: “All of this requires a whole-of-government approach, supported by our broader society, with education and awareness acting as key agents of transformation. The Resilience Reference Curriculum constitutes an important guiding framework for developing courses, study programmes, and training on the topic of resilience for defence education purposes.”

Allies and partners can leverage the Resilience Reference Curriculum to develop their own tailored courses on resilience, with support provided through NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. Mr. Mariusz Solis, Lead for DEEP, highlighted NATO’s commitment to assisting partners: “The Resilience Reference Curriculum will be available to all interested partners and Allies. DEEP will work diligently to help partners who request support in implementing tailored versions of the curriculum for their professional military education institutions. NATO will also work to implement the RRC as a distance course. Supporting our partners in this way makes us all stronger and more resilient in the face of threats to our shared security.”

With this initiative, NATO continues to reinforce its commitment to enhancing resilience education and strengthening the collective security of the Alliance and its partners.

Foreword

“Resilience underpins our efforts to safeguard our nations, societies and shared values.”

NATO 2022 Strategic Concept

The Euro-Atlantic area is no longer at peace. After 75 years, NATO remains strong. Our success has always rested on our ability to deter and defend against all the threats and challenges we face – and we have to recognize that these have increased dramatically in recent years.

As a result, the need for national and collective resilience as an essential enabler of credible deterrence and defence is more critical than it has been in decades.

While NATO and Allies are implementing a series of extensive and forward-looking decisions to strengthen their resilience, a mindset paradigm shift is also taking place. One that positions preparedness for crisis and readiness to support military operations at the heart of our efforts to defend the Alliance.

All of this requires a whole-of-government approach, supported by our broader society, with education and awareness acting as key agents of transformation. The Resilience Reference Curriculum constitutes an important guiding framework for developing courses, study programmes and trainings on the topic of resilience for defence education purposes.

We take this opportunity to express our deep gratitude to all the experts who contributed to drafting this comprehensive document. Their work will benefit Allies’ and NATO partners’ professional defence education institutions as well as the broader resilience community that is engaged in building a shared culture of resilience among civil and military stakeholders. At NATO, we see these efforts not just as a desirable goal, but as a prerequisite for successfully meeting the complex challenges ahead of us.

How to use the Resilience Reference Curriculum

About the document

The Resilience Reference Curriculum (RRC) is designed to address “resilience” and its role in the contemporary world of uncertainties, disruptions, interdependence, and technological breakthroughs. Understanding and educating members of the defence and security sector on the concept of resilience is in high demand. Because resilience has different meanings and interpretations in different contexts it is challenging to develop a homogeneous framework that would fit all actors on all levels of governance. Therefore, the purpose of the RRC is to provide every interested stakeholder (military, civilian, public, or private) with a comprehensive package of information necessary to:

a) Understand the concept of resilience and assess threats to it in their own contexts (Theme 1);

b) Understand whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches to resilience and analyse physical and psychological elements and variables that resilience depends on (Theme 1, Theme 2, Theme 3); and

c) Learn how to develop, implement, and assess resilience strategies in specific contexts (Theme 4).

The RRC provides a guiding framework for developing courses, study programmes, and training sessions on the topic of resilience for military and civilian audiences in defence and security educational institutions. It should be viewed as a practical resource that can serve as a guiding foundation for instructors and trainers to develop and enhance their course plans and syllabi and adapt them to their specific contexts and classroom environments. The RRC aims to help educators, trainers, and students develop an appreciation of the broad spectrum of issues related to various aspects of resilience that are relevant to defence and security contexts.

This curriculum includes vignettes, which are practical real-life examples that illustrate and reinforce the principal concepts of each lesson. Each vignette represents a short extract from a broader case study that can help instructors develop specific lessons within the larger content of the RRC. Some vignettes are used multiple times to underscore connections and interdependencies between various components of resilience. Each vignette includes references for further in-depth analysis of the case study presented in it.

Based on the RRC, the instructors should be able to design courses that will enable the students to:

1) Differentiate and assess resilience on individual, organisational, community, society, national, and multinational levels.

2) Evaluate physical and psychological aspects of resilience and analyse their effects on national security.

3) Apply resilience concepts in various defence and security contexts, by considering a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches and particularly highlighting civil-military interdependencies and interconnections between all instruments of national power.

4) Operationalise the concept of resilience as a continuous and dynamic process by developing, implementing, and assessing strategies aimed at improving resilience in specific contexts.

Key questions to consider while developing curricula based on this RRC:

1) When and why is resilience required for an actor at any level within defence and security sectors?

2) What are the components and measurable levels of resilience?

3) What are the factors that support an actor’s ability to be resilient and what factors could diminish the resilience of an actor?

4) What is the role of government (both civilian and military components), private sector and civil society in developing societal resilience?

5) What actions are necessary to operationalise resilience?

6) How can an actor’s capacity to be resilient be increased/expanded?

The structure of the RRC

The RRC starts with an extensive introduction to the concept of resilience by providing an executive summary of the curriculum content. It is crucial that the users of the RRC develop a holistic understanding of the multiplicity of important resilience-related aspects 4 before exposing themselves to the nuanced dissection of the concept spread across the four chapters of the document referred to as “themes”.

Theme 1 elaborates on the concept of resilience in the context of defence and security and provides users with conceptual frameworks for analysing levels, elements, variables and successive stages of resilience. This theme also discusses threats to resilience and the ways of assessing those threats on various levels.

Theme 2 describes the whole-of-government approach to resilience and demonstrates the interdependencies between resilience and various instruments of national power. It provides learners with tools to analyse the importance of close coordination and cooperation between government agencies, and explores multinational aspects of resilience.

Theme 3 introduces the concept of societal resilience and highlights the indispensable role of civil society and the private sector for resilience in the contemporary strategic environment. Theme 3 focuses on the whole-of-society approach to building societal resilience, which includes governmental authorities, the private sector and civil society. The theme explores why and how societal resilience, as an indispensable part of national resilience, is crucial for national endurance, and how to cultivate resilience within society at individual, community, organisation, and society levels.

Theme 4 is aimed at helping users operationalise and apply the concept of resilience by describing ways to develop, implement, and assess resilience across various levels and in various contexts.

Each lesson contains core and supplementary readings that show interdisciplinary approaches to resilience meant to further enhance understanding of resilience.

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