What is the Issue?
Modern shocks no longer stay within their lanes; they bleed across boundaries. A cyberattack can paralyse hospitals, trigger financial panic, and ignite political unrest. A maritime chokepoint disruption cascades into energy security, trade, and domestic stability. Interdependence is the defining feature of modern societies — economic, financial, informational, and digital — and while it delivers prosperity, it also generates systemic vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 emphasises that crises are now characterised by simultaneity and amplification, not sequence. OECD resilience frameworks stress that national preparedness is insufficient where critical infrastructure is internationally owned and globally integrated. In practice, this means that resilience cannot be seen as a government or military task alone. It requires structured cooperation across public institutions, private corporations, and civil society.

Military capability illustrates this starkly: rapid reinforcement depends on commercial transport networks; command and control relies on privately owned telecoms; energy flows through global supply chains managed by multinational firms. When those civilian infrastructures falter, deterrence and defence falter with them.

What We See Working
NATO recognised this early. At the 2019 Norfolk, Virginia conference on Interdependencies in Resilience, allied leaders underscored that resilience must be understood as systemic, not sectoral. Since then, NATO has embedded interdependency analysis into doctrine, exercises, and baseline requirements — testing not just military readiness, but how entire ecosystems absorb shocks.

The organisations that respond most effectively share three practices:

1. Mapping vulnerabilities across domains. They examine how failures in one system propagate into others, exposing hidden links that are otherwise ignored. Deloitte’s work on network resilience reinforces this: the real measure is how the system recovers, not whether a single node is robust.
   
   
   

2. Joint exercises and modelling. NATO’s simulations have shown that only by rehearsing system-wide disruption do hidden dependencies surface. Commercial actors that adopt the same approach — rehearsing supply chain breakdowns, cyber failures, or misinformation surges — uncover blind spots before adversaries do.
   
   
   

3. Whole-of-society cooperation. The OECD and NATO alike stress that resilience requires structured partnerships between governments, private firms, and civil society. Ownership of infrastructure is international; legitimacy in crisis depends on public trust. Both are indispensable.
   
   
   

A Southeast Asian Lens
Nowhere is this more relevant than in Southeast Asia. Singapore, as a global logistics, financial, and digital hub, sits at the confluence of multiple interdependencies. Energy imports rely on secure maritime flows; financial markets are tied into global clearing systems; digital connectivity depends on undersea cables and cloud services. Any disruption in these domains could have cascading regional effects.

Yet Singapore also provides a model of forward-thinking resilience. Its Total Defence framework explicitly incorporates society as a pillar of security, blending military readiness with civil, economic, social, and psychological resilience. Public campaigns, private sector partnerships, and national exercises such as Exercise Northstar demonstrate how a government can engage its population and institutions in preparedness. Far from treating resilience as a government monopoly, Singapore has positioned it as a shared responsibility — a mindset that other nations would do well to study.

What You Can Do Next
For leaders, the implications are clear:

• Treat resilience as a continuous process of absorbing, adapting, and transforming, not a static plan.

• Commission cross-sector exercises that expose dependencies between civilian and military systems, and between domestic and international actors.

• Use scenario modelling to anticipate second- and third-order effects rather than relying on narrow risk registers.

• Invest in societal involvement: building trust, communication, and cooperation across public and private domains before crises occur.

Final Word
Interdependencies are not peripheral to resilience; they are its core. They explain both the strengths that underpin prosperity and the vulnerabilities adversaries exploit. NATO’s work highlights the necessity of treating them as a collective strategic concern. Singapore demonstrates that even in a highly exposed position, resilience can be reimagined as a societal endeavour, not a governmental slogan.

The lesson is simple: resilience is not about fortifying walls, but about strengthening the connective tissue. Those who recognise, map, and rehearse their interdependencies will not only withstand shocks more effectively — they will retain the capacity to act, to deter, and to lead in a world where it is the hidden links, not the visible structures, that decide outcomes.