Rehearsal isn’t resilience

In the Indo-Pacific, institutions tend to give the most attention to scenarios that can be briefed well. That focus can be necessary, but it is also costly. It pulls resources and attention toward the contingency that becomes the organising scenario. A culture organised around one dominant contingency can treat other forms of pressure as noise.

To illustrate the problem, consider the historical experience of Singapore in 1942.

For years, British planners expected a seaborne assault and built the island’s defence around that concern. Coastal guns and defensive preparations reflected the sea threat, while landward defences received less attention. The assumption was not unreasonable when first made, but by the time Japanese forces swept down the Malay Peninsula from the northwest, it had become more than an assumption. It shaped decisions that planners could not reverse quickly. By the time the weakness became undeniable, there was little time left to rebuild the defence around it. The problem was not that planners were careless. The system had spent years reinforcing confidence in one threat while making a different one harder to accept.

This history reveals that a well-rehearsed institution can still be poorly prepared. It can practice one threat for so long, with so much money and professional reputation attached to it, that a different threat becomes harder to see. This is not simply neglect. It happens when a system has made paying attention to other dangers more costly.

Large organisations tend to preserve the forms of preparedness that can be shown: readiness ratings, completed exercises, audited checklists. Those metrics matter, but they can also push aside a harder question: whether the institution is rehearsing the wrong problem, or only one version of the right one. Once time, money, and careers have organised around a threat, challenging the scenario means asking colleagues to admit that much of their work may rest on beliefs that no longer hold. Institutions rarely reward that conversation. Readiness becomes proof that the process was followed, not evidence that an organisation can adapt when the next crisis arrives in an unexpected form.

A similar problem appeared in the night naval battles around Guadalcanal also in 1942. Allied sailors were not incompetent. Their training and habits favoured daylight gunnery, ordered formations, and battles that followed familiar patterns. The Japanese forced a different contest: night action, torpedoes, and sudden shifts in tempo that Allied doctrine had not prepared them to handle. The training had assumed an opponent who would fight on familiar terms. The Japanese did not.

The common thread was not incompetence. At Singapore, the problem was not that planners had ignored defence. It was that the seaborne threat had become the threat around which plans and reputations were organised. Questioning it meant questioning the work built on top of it. At Guadalcanal, the failed training was also the training that had shaped the navy’s confidence. Neither institution had much incentive to ask, before combat answered the question, whether its preparation was too narrow.

That adjustment cost matters in the Indo-Pacific where investments that make one scenario easier to execute can make other scenarios harder to recognise and practice. Pressure there often arrives in forms that do not trigger the main plan: grey-zone coercion, economic punishment, cyber disruption – all potentially acting as noise even when they are part of the strategic contest.

The fix is not simply to do more exercises. It is to judge exercises by what they expose, not only by what they confirm. After a major drill, the better question is not whether the plan worked, but what the plan assumed, and which assumptions would not survive contact with events. Different scenarios need a way to stay in the conversation after the exercise ends.

Readiness metrics are still necessary, but they become misleading when they stand in for judgment. Metrics can show that an organisation practiced what it planned to practice. That kind of readiness travels well in narrative form. The more important test is whether the organisation can notice when reality no longer matches the rehearsal.

The next crisis may not match the planning document. An organisation that treats rehearsal as resilience risks more than surprise. The plan it practiced for years may become the thing that slows its adjustment when the crisis does not follow the script.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the US Department of Defense or the US Government.