EDITORIAL: Resilience, at home and beyond

Harun Talha Ayanoglu, a visiting research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR), usually writes about materiel and defense issues. In “What does resilience even mean?” published on this page on June 21 this year, he explored the concept of resilience from a wider perspective, and concluded that, at its most fundamental, it was about people.

Rather than offering solutions, the article was about broadening the scope of the debate to facilitating the participation of immigrant communities and migrant workers in the provisions for societal resilience in the event of natural disasters or national security crises. Just as national debate focuses on weapons procurement and whether US President Donald Trump would release a US$14 billion arms package to help the nation resist an attack from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), other minds are concentrated on how the government can bolster resilience within local communities, through ensuring that systems, basic infrastructure and levels of morale are maintained.

Over the past week, this page has included articles discussing aspects such as medical and energy resilience, as well as how the government can take technologies such as drones into consideration in resilience planning. The article “Resilience comes from redundancy” by Yasuyuki Ishida, a Japanese scholar focusing on maritime security, published on this page today extends the idea of resilience further out into the region, along the First Island Chain. Together, these articles explore the complex, multi-layered approach to how we might answer Ayanoglu’s question.

In “Taiwan needs medical resilience” (Sept. 24, page 8), National Taiwan University graduate healthcare policy researcher Hanson Wu (吳宗翰) wrote about how medical resilience should be viewed not only as a healthcare issue, but as “a pillar of civilian resilience.” He imagines a society under pressure from attack or a sustained blockade from the PLA and how, just as defending the nation against missiles, ensuring that hospitals remain operational and medical supplies remain available when supply chains come under strain is essential.

Wu includes considerations of maintaining medical services, adequate supplies of medicines with a variety of storage requirements, and the logistics of distribution and access in challenging situations over sustained periods, but he also writes about how a system breakdown would weaken society’s willingness and ability to endure, as well as how cohesion and resilience could become vulnerable when people lose confidence in essential services. He adds that this potential vulnerability is exactly what a hostile external force would be seeking to exploit by extended blockades or “quarantining” Taiwan, stopping short of an actual invasion, but providing a route to its objective nevertheless.

As Wu says, “a coercive campaign succeeds when disruption turns into exhaustion and exhaustion becomes political pressure.” He also cautions that to ensure medical resilience, arrangements should be tested during peacetime, not improvised under pressure.

Part of these arrangements would necessitate building a degree of redundancy into the system, where shortages from one source or compromised system could be obtained from another.

In “We need civilian energy resilience” (Oct. 1, page 8), INDSR visiting researcher Phoebe Pham (范菲比) and policy analyst Lin Jun-rong (林均蓉) argued that energy resilience is a participatory process, not just a top-down planning problem, and requires cooperation from all levels of society — from government to industry and civil organizations to people on the ground, including careful consideration of how to facilitate communication and synergy between these groups. They write of the importance of clarity of who does what “when the grid goes dark,” and how trust could turn “local capacity into national endurance.”

Returning to his field of expertise, Ayanoglu explores in “Drone strategy beyond production” (Sept. 29, page 8) what must be done if Taiwan is to be able to effectively utilize the drones that it is manufacturing in the event of an emergency, including integration into operations and command structures.

Finally, Ishida proposes building resilience — not only in terms of military capability, but also in terms of disaster response and economic resilience — into the First Island Chain, through coordination with Tokyo and eventually Manila, regarding it as a collection of nodes within a coordinated network that creates resilience out of redundancy in the region, in the same way that Wu views the concept of redundancy to be crucial to medial resilience on the local level.