“Whole-of-society defense resilience” — these words have been coming up a lot lately.
From a national perspective, it’s a policy framework with committees, budgets, and action items.

We hear the word resilience all the time, but we don’t seem to use it much in everyday life.
Resilience is the speed at which a person, an organization, or a system recovers from a blow.
A rubber band has a certain resilience. Our bodies have a certain resilience. Our nation and society also need to build resilience.

In the context of civil defense and society, this definition applies at every level.

Individual resilience means you can get through those three days without water or electricity.
It means you have some food stored, a fully charged power bank, and you know where the water shutoff valve is in your home.
You don’t instantly lose the ability to sustain yourself. You can handle basic natural or man-made disasters.

More specifically, it means your body can hold up.
There are no elevators at a disaster site. Moving things requires human power. You might have to walk a very long way.
Going for a run, doing strength training — that’s actually part of civil defense too.

The Home Fortress workshop that the Ganghu Civil Defense Team has been promoting — this is the layer we’re trying to help everyone prepare for.
If possible, don’t go to a shelter.
Don’t be forced to leave because your home has no food, no supplies, or the conditions have deteriorated.
To avoid going to a shelter, you should be thoroughly prepared.
At the same time, be prepared physically and health-wise.

The next level up is the family.

Family resilience means that when someone is injured, someone in the household knows how to handle it.
It means the whole family has agreed on where to meet if they can’t reach each other.
This takes almost no time, but the vast majority of families have never had this conversation.

Basic minor injuries and illnesses — you can handle them yourself.
Even when an ambulance can’t arrive in time, you’re able to keep a family member alive until help comes.
If you can do that, you’re already very resilient.

The next level up is the business.

This layer is often overlooked, but most people spend eight to ten hours a day there.
For adults, most of their waking lives are spent at the workplace.

Today the company runs into trouble — the IT systems go down, the office is inaccessible, the supply chain breaks. Can the company respond quickly?
It doesn’t have to be a hundred percent — can it get things back to seventy or eighty percent?
Can it maintain communication among employees, with suppliers and clients?
Can it maintain cash flow? Keep paying salaries? Keep paying rent?

And this doesn’t require a war to be relevant.
Taiwanese businesses should already be pulling out extreme scenarios for regular discussion: what if the internet goes down, what if the power goes out, what if employees can’t get home, where is the data, who has access.
Having discussed it versus not having discussed it — the difference is enormous.
In the past, working from home might have been a company perk. Now it might be your business resilience.

Parallel to the business is the community.

This is the layer I feel most strongly about, because the Ganghu Civil Defense Team is a local group.

This is the internet age.
You might be close with your friends, but you rarely see each other in person.
It’s also hard to meet new people, and your friends live far away.

Because of the tech industry parks in the Ganghu area, our team has a lot of young people who moved up from other parts of Taiwan.
Living alone in a rented room or studio — when something really happens, family might be in Taichung, in Changhua, in Kaohsiung. Nobody can come help you right away.

The person who can help at that moment is someone who lives within a ten-minute walk and who you actually know.

So what local groups are really doing is building real, physical connections between people.
This can’t be done online. That’s exactly why we have almost no online activities.
We want everyone to know each other, and to be familiar with and trust one another.

While working from home is business resilience, most businesses and employees would also agree that 100% online meetings don’t always deliver the best efficiency.
The occasional in-person meeting still effectively boosts productivity.

The last level is the nation.

National resilience is the sum of the four layers below it.
Every individual, every family, every company, every community — if all of them can recover to at least a passing level of functioning after getting punched (whether by natural disaster, man-made catastrophe, or war), that sum is whole-of-society resilience.
If the bottom four layers are empty, no amount of budget at the top layer can hold it up.

People often ask: will Taiwan and China actually go to war?
I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Whether the other side decides to act, and how they choose to act — that’s not in our hands.
What’s in our hands is only whether we’re prepared.
When every layer is prepared, the cost of the other side making a move becomes very high.
Preparation itself is deterrence.

Some people also say, that sounds like a lot to do.
It’s actually not that much.

Between now and November, people’s time and attention will be on the local elections, and that’s completely understandable — same for me.
Regardless of the outcome, after the election is over, take a small fraction of the time you were putting into politics.

Don’t redirect all of it — you’ll genuinely burn out.
An hour or two a week is already more than enough.

Go learn some knowledge.
Go practice some skills.
Go get to know the people around you.

Civil defense doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time, and it doesn’t necessarily require doing a lot.
But it definitely has to start.