Deterrence by denial rests on a practical promise. An attack on a state’s infrastructure will not produce the effect an adversary expects. Resilience contributes to that promise only when continuity measures can reduce losses under the disruptions an adversary can impose.

A continuity plan is the plan an agency or operator uses to preserve or restore functions that must continue during a disruption. For federal agencies, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) document Federal Continuity Directive 2 formalizes the identification and business-process analysis of mission essential functions. An interdependence model describes how the loss of capability in one sector propagates to sectors that depend on it. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) document NIST SP 800-82 describes U.S. critical infrastructure as highly interconnected and mutually dependent, warning that failures can cascade across systems. This is referred to as a continuity target, which is one that must be kept above a specified service level or restored within a specified time. It is not a formal FEMA term. The distinction matters because identifying an essential function verses proof that a target reduces systemic damage, otherwise known as a continuity target, are different tasks.

An illustrative Example: The U.S. Economy

Consider an illustrative cascade model using the U.S. economy. The model receives a service-integrity failure: a sector remains physically online, but the output other sectors depend upon can no longer be trusted. The disturbance runs for six time increments using stylized dependency coefficients. Inoperability represents the fraction of useful service loss, while total systemic loss is a cumulative inoperability across all modeled sectors.

If telecommunications is the origin, the struck sector reaches 63 percent inoperability. Yet 71 percent of cumulative systemic loss occurs outside telecommunications, in sectors that depend on it. Much of the damage from a sector failure may therefore emerge elsewhere. Now add a continuity target. Suppose each sector can cap its own inoperability at 30 percent. Applying that target to telecommunications reduces total systemic loss by 44 percent. Applying the same target to any downstream sector does not reduce the total systemic loss.

This is the point. Downstream sectors never lose more than 6 to 23 percent of their service, so their 30 percent continuity targets are never reached. In operations-research terms, the constraint never binds. An organization can spend substantial resources maintaining a target that appears prudent on paper but changes nothing in the scenario being tested.

Now, lower the modeled target to 5 percent and some downstream measures begin to matter. The best produces a 14 percent reduction in systemic loss. The specific percentages are illustrative. The structural result matters more because a continuity target can be demanding in isolation, yet irrelevant once cross-sector propagation is considered.

Upon further analysis, if one changes the origin of the failure, the result changes again. When the same disturbance begins in electric power rather than telecommunications, total systemic loss rises by 15

percent even though the originating sector peaks lower, because damage spreads more evenly. The ranking of which continuity measures provide the greatest reduction also changes.

A continuity target therefore has no deterrent meaning in the abstract. Its value depends on the disruption’s origin, dependency structure, severity, and duration.

From Resilience to Deterrence

Natalie Treloar and Jean-Claude Meledje recently argued that dynamic resilience should replace the pursuit of brittle stability. The argument is compelling, but resilience becomes deterrence by denial only when it measurably reduces the damage an attacker expects to inflict. A declared capacity to endure is not the same as a tested capacity that changes an attacker’s expected payoff.

An adversary also sees infrastructure differently from an individual operator. An operator plans from inside its own organization; an adversary selecting an origin point can evaluate the network as a whole. Public data already make part of that assessment possible. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes input-output accounts showing direct and indirect production relationships among U.S. industries. These accounts do not reveal operational vulnerabilities by themselves, but they provide a public starting map of economic interdependence.

An adversary does not need access to every continuity plan to exploit that asymmetry. It needs to identify nodes with disproportionate downstream effects and disruptions likely to be long-lived. Sophisticated adversaries can estimate dependency structures and test alternative origins even when detailed performance targets remain protected.

Also, duration matters as much as depth. In the illustrative model, the health sector ranks only fifth by peak inoperability but recovers last because it combines heavy dependence on other sectors with slow restoration. A triage scheme based only on immediate loss would therefore underrate a function whose prolonged degradation could create greater coercive leverage.

What Should Change

Continuity targets should be tested against cross-sector scenarios before being treated as evidence of denial. A useful target should answer four questions:

1. From which disruption origins was it tested?
2. Does it bind to relevant sectors?
3. How much cumulative system loss does it avert?
4. How much does it shorten degradation or recovery?

The Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Agency (CISA) already provides a cross-sector framework through its National Critical Functions work, while NIST guidance recognizes physical and logical interdependencies among operational systems. CISA could sponsor a protected pilot combining public BEA input-output structures with nonpublic operational data on recovery rates, service floors, and continuity costs.

The purpose would not be to publish exploitable thresholds. Detailed targets can remain protected. The public result should instead be an assurance claim that “continuity measures were tested against multiple failure origins, became binding where expected, and produced measurable reductions in cumulative loss and recovery time.”

None of the numerical results above describes the real U.S. economy. The coefficients are illustrative, the disturbance is simplified, and detection delay sits outside the model. That is precisely why the next step should be empirical rather than rhetorical. The public economic accounts exist. Sector operators hold the missing operational parameters, and the question is testable.

Dynamic resilience is a stronger deterrent concept than a promise to return to yesterday’s equilibrium. But resilience that never activates to counter the damage an adversary is positioned to inflict does not deny anything. It documents preparation without demonstrating effect.

The standard should therefore be stricter and more useful. Do not just ask whether an essential function has a continuity plan. Ask whether its performance target becomes binding in the scenarios that matter and how much adversary-imposed loss it prevents.

Burak Oktenli is an independent researcher conducting work on the governance of authority in autonomous and AI-enabled systems. His writing has appeared in Dark Reading, RealClearDefense, the Modern War Institute at West Point, and the Lieber Institute’s Articles of War. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Resilience Never Activated, Deters No One was originally published on Global Security Review.

For over a century, the primary objective of global diplomacy has been the pursuit of “stability.” From the Concert of Europe through the bipolar rigidity of the Cold War, stability was defined as a predictable baseline; a state of equilibrium characterized by established rules, clearly defined poles, and static “red lines.” Within this framework, the goal of the strategist was to maintain the balance of power and prevent the system from tipping into overt conflict. However, in the contemporary era, the pursuit of stability ceased to be a safeguard; it has become a strategic liability. 

The fundamental error of current strategic thinking is due to Stability Illusion, which is the belief that the world is a linear system where shocks are anomalies and a return to a “normal” baseline is possible. This logic assumes that the international order is a series of walls designed to keep the storm at bay. But the world is no longer operating on such a predictable script. 

In a multipolar system, friction is not accidental; it is a structural feature. Power is no longer distributed along a single axis of competition and instead across a web of overlapping and often contradictory interests. This creates a Friction Engine where a strategic adjustment in one domain (e.g., a trade tariff in the Pacific) produces cascading, non-linear effects in another (e.g., a security realignment in the Arctic). The danger arises when states apply linear solutions to these non-linear frictions. When policymakers treat geopolitical risk as though it was compliance oriented or as a set of isolated events to be mitigated, they ignore the systemic architecture. They are attempting to fix the symptoms of volatility while remaining trapped in a paradigm that denies the volatility itself. 

Australia illustrates the constraints of strategic thinking in a multipolar environment. As a medium power tied to both Western security structures and Asian economic networks, it has long attempted to balance U.S. strategic protection with Chinese economic integration. 

This was the logic of the stable centre concept; the assumption that Australia could maintain equilibrium between two major poles without choosing between them. That assumption depended on a stable international environment in which economic and security domains remained separable. That environment no longer exists. 

China’s rise as both a conventional and nuclear-armed power fundamentally alters the regional structure. Conventional modernization, which includes advanced naval capabilities, long-range precision strike systems, and anti-access architectures, is now integrated with a credible and expanding nuclear deterrent posture. This compresses escalation thresholds and erodes the distinction between peacetime competition and wartime signaling. 

At the same time, Australia’s security posture is anchored in U.S. extended nuclear deterrence. This is not a secondary feature of its defense policy. Instead, it is the core guarantee underpinning deterrence against nuclear-armed adversaries. Australia does not possess an independent nuclear capability. Its strategic confidence rests on the credibility of U.S. nuclear commitments and their willingness to extend them into a contested Indo-Pacific theater. This creates a structurally integrated but fragile position. Economic dependence on China generates exposure to coercion, while security dependence on the U.S. demands alignment in defense planning, intelligence integration, and regional deterrence signaling. The result is not balance, but strategic compression and a narrowing of maneuver space in which hedging increases rather than reduces vulnerability. 

The breaking point is not a single crisis but the erosion of foundational assumptions. Economic and security domains are no longer separable. Military modernization carries nuclear implications. Trade interdependence becomes strategic leverage, and alliance credibility becomes a systemic variable shaping all other domains. Australia’s dilemma, therefore, is not a diplomatic failure. It is a paradigmatic one. It assumed a system capable of equilibrium. It operates within a nonlinear environment where every adjustment produces cascading effects. 

A question emerging from this condition is whether bilateral extended nuclear deterrence is sufficient in a multipolar nuclear environment. The Indo-Pacific is no longer structured around a single guarantor-recipient axis. It is a distributed deterrence environment in which credibility is continuously tested across multiple theaters and domains. From this perspective, a purely bilateral model may be structurally underpowered. The alternative is the emergence of a more explicit Indo-Pacific nuclear alliance architecture that is not necessarily through proliferation, but through formalized integration of deterrence signaling, strategic coordination, and shared escalation management. Such a framework would reinforce extended deterrence by embedding it within a networked structure of allied commitments, increasing credibility through collective signaling rather than bilateral assurance alone. 

Australia’s position thus reveals a broader systemic reality that medium powers are no longer operating in stable equilibrium spaces. They are embedded in integrated pressure systems where deterrence, economics, and information are inseparable. If stability is a mirage, what is the alternative? The answer is Dynamic Resilience. We must move from a model of deterrence that acts as a wall to a model that acts like a shock absorber. While stability seeks to prevent the storm, Dynamic Resilience seeks to navigate it. Dynamic Resilience is not about managing risk in the traditional sense, which is often a defensive, reactive posture. Instead, it is an offensive strategic architecture. It requires three core shifts: from equilibrium to agility, from separation to synthesis, and from bilateralism to networked deterrence. 

The pursuit of strategic stability is a relic of a bygone era. To cling to it is to invite fragility. The global architect must now abandon the illusion of the “stable centre” and embrace the volatility of the multipolar era. By replacing brittle walls with a framework of Dynamic Resilience, organizations, and states can move beyond mere survival. They can transition from a state of vulnerability to a state of strength, turning global friction into a systemic competitive advantage. 

Dr Jean-Claude Meledje is a Founder and Director at Kexscl Consultancy. He is also an independent geopolitics analyst specializing in regional proxy dynamics and cross-border insurgencies. His work focuses on contemporary geopolitical risks across the Middle East, Indo-Pacific, Africa and beyond. Natalie Treloar is the Australian Company Director of Alpha-India Consultancy, a Senior Fellow at the Indo-Pacific Studies Center (IPSC), a Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS), and a member of the Open Nuclear Network (ONN). Her work is geopolitics, defense, and deterrence within the Indo-Pacific region. The views of the authors are their own.

The Impossibility of Strategic Stability in a Multipolar Era: From Brittle Walls to Dynamic Resilience was originally published on Global Security Review.