On September 15, 2026, NATO released its full Baseline Requirements for Resilience for the first time.
They cover continuity of government, energy supplies, food and water, mass casualties, civilian communications, transportation, population movements and evacuation.
The document explicitly plans for sabotage, cyberattacks, attacks on critical infrastructure and situations of "crisis and conflict".
Three days later, Switzerland adopted its new national Security Policy Strategy.
Its government's assessment is unusually direct: the international security environment has become "increasingly unstable and volatile."
Among Switzerland's priorities for the coming years: resilience, protection capabilities and defence. Quite a statement from a country famous for its neutrality! But neutrality was never free. It only works if you can afford to defend it.
None of this means European governments know that war is coming next Tuesday. That would be a ridiculous conclusion.
But after watching these signals converge and accelerate over the past year, my assessment is that something more consequential has happened:
Europe has entered a different security regime.
European governments and institutions are no longer planning only around isolated natural disasters on one side and conventional warfare on the other.
They are planning for a grey-zone security environment in which sabotage, cyberattacks and hybrid operations can interact with energy disruption, fragile supply chains, degraded communications and cascading infrastructure failures.
These are not rhetorical concepts buried in defence papers.
They concern the systems we use every day: electricity, telecommunications, banking, transportation, fuel, food distribution, healthcare and access to information. And European governments are telling civilians to prepare for the possibility that some of those systems may temporarily stop functioning normally.
The convergence of signals I am watching
Civil preparedness is moving from recommendation to policy.
In March 2025, the European Commission adopted its Preparedness Union Strategy and called for Europeans to maintain essential supplies for a minimum of 72 hours during an emergency.
Since then, that policy has moved into public communication. France, the Netherlands, Finland and Germany have all published national preparedness guidance for their citizens. Detailed, public and readily available to anyone willing to actually read it.
The language has changed.
Official documents speak explicitly about sabotage, cyberattacks, hybrid threats, critical dependencies, crisis and conflict. Not just floods, fires and earthquakes.
Civilian infrastructure is part of security and defence planning.
Energy, transportation, communications, healthcare, food and water are treated as strategic capabilities because both society and military operations depend on them.
Governments are planning for cascading failures.
Modern systems are deeply interdependent. Electricity affects telecommunications. Telecommunications affect payments. Payments affect fuel and commerce. Transport affects food, medicine and logistics.
And that is why the number "72 hours" keeps appearing.
The basic idea is that, if a major disruption occurs, you should be capable of functioning for roughly three days without assuming that electricity, water, telecommunications, electronic payments, transport or emergency services will operate normally.
I understand why governments use 72 hours. It gives emergency services time to prioritise the most vulnerable and deal with the immediate consequences of a crisis without millions of people becoming dependent on assistance at exactly the same time.
But personally, I would not treat 72 hours as the objective. I would treat it as the floor.
If my circumstances allowed it, I would want my household to remain reasonably functional for around seven days without relying on normal networks, with longer margins for a small number of genuinely critical needs.
Electricity may return while telecommunications remain degraded. Fuel may exist while payment systems do not. Shops may reopen while particular products remain unavailable. Transport may operate while supply chains are still catching up.
The problem is not necessarily chaos and complete shortage. It may simply be unreliable access. A resilient position gives you time before one of those dependencies forces the decision for you.
What adequate preparation looks like will obviously depend on where you live, who depends on you, your health, mobility, geography and the infrastructure around you.
There is no universal checklist. There are only vulnerabilities, resources, dependencies and options and the relationship between them. Which brings me to the question I am interested in.
I don't particularly care why governments settled on 72 hours.
I care about what those 72 hours are supposed to buy you.
Owning an emergency bag is easy... Understanding how dependent you are on systems you do not control - and what happens to your ability to think and act when several of them fail at once - is much harder.
What exactly are those 72 hours supposed to buy you?
In what follows, I will look at what preparedness means beyond the checklist: material autonomy, communication, mobility, community, optionality but also cognitive preparedness: the ability to preserve a workable model of reality, distinguish facts from interpretation, and keep making decisions when information becomes fragmented, contradictory or simply unavailable.