Preparing for the Wrong War: Why Military Readiness No Longer Belongs to the Military

The post-1991 assumption of enduring peace has eroded. States now face a growing range of interconnected threats operating across military, technological, and societal domains. In this context, the question of military preparedness has taken on renewed importance. Yet what does it mean for a state to be militarily “ready” in this new era?

The state-on-state conflicts of the 20th century have been replaced by hybrid wars and asymmetric contests, in which there is no clear-cut distinction between soldiers and civilians, or between organised violence, terror, crime, and war.[1] While traditional conceptions of preparedness, rooted in reliance on hard power, remain essential, they are no longer sufficient. Instead, military readiness is dependent on the resilience of the wider state, as contemporary threats target not only military forces but also the systems and societies that sustain them.

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Traditionally, military readiness has meant the capacity to mobilise and deploy forces at the onset of conflict. This is an idea built on the assumption that war is episodic. Yet such conceptions are increasingly at odds with the character of contemporary conflict. Today’s threats operate continuously within a grey zone between peace and war. Hybrid methods, such as cyber operations, disinformation, sabotage, and other activities below the threshold of armed conflict, create an environment in which attribution is difficult and deterrence less straightforward.

Western military thinking has been notably slow to internalise these shifts. There remains a tendency to look past the ambiguity of today’s security environment, clinging instead to familiar models of conflict, ones in which adversaries present themselves in uniform, mass forces, and fight the kinds of wars states are institutionally and intellectually comfortable preparing for. Yet military preparedness can no longer be defined by hard power alone. As Mao Zedong theorised, war has multiple constituent components, and overwhelming military power alone is inadequate to serve strategic interests.[2] Today, this idea remains highly relevant, as defensive capacity is increasingly found at the societal level, where the resilience of civilian systems conditions the effectiveness of military power itself. In this sense, war is now “amongst the people.”[3]

Poland, a former member of the Warsaw Pact and a NATO member for over 25 years, occupies a critical position on the Alliance’s eastern flank. Its strategic culture has long been shaped by a persistent perception of Russia as the primary security threat. The annexation of Crimea and the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine were sobering reminders for Warsaw that conventional interstate war remains central to European security. In response, Poland has pursued an aggressively kinetic model of preparedness over the past decade, emerging as one of NATO’s highest defence spenders, amounting to over 5% of its total GDP in 2025.[4]

In terms of hard power, Poland far exceeds the majority of its European counterparts. Yet its emphasis on military capacity is misleading. Preparedness remains heavily concentrated within the Polish armed forces, which are not only tasked with deterrence and defence but increasingly positioned as responders to non-military crises. Civilian systems, by contrast, have lagged. Despite a strong historical narrative of national resistance, this has failed to translate into an institutionalised civil preparedness.

A contrasting approach can be observed in Finland, another frontline NATO state with a long and historically grounded awareness of the Russian threat. Rather than prioritising military capability in isolation, Finland has developed a model of “comprehensive security.” Central to this is the integration of civilian actors into national defence. Preparedness is treated not as a purely military responsibility, but as a shared societal function distributed across government institutions, the private sector, and the public. In 2024, the Finnish Government published a guide designed to help individuals prepare for disruptions and crises. The guide consolidated preparedness instructions from a range of organisations and agencies, offering advice on how to respond to everyday disruptions such as power and water outages or interruptions to internet and online banking services, as well as larger-scale crises, including natural disasters, pandemics, and military conflict. The key objective was to underscore the shared responsibility of individuals and authorities, while reducing the prevailing assumption that “society will take care of it.”[5]

What the Finnish model recognises is that military readiness is not about whether a state can generate force at the outbreak of war, but whether it can continue to function under sustained, multi-domain pressure. Armed forces do not operate in a vacuum; they are embedded within complex networks of infrastructure, information, and public consent. When these systems are degraded, military effectiveness degrades in tandem. The locus of vulnerability, therefore, shifts from the battlefield to the connective tissue of the state itself.[6]

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In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, governments across the globe sought to devise ways of addressing the emerging Islamist threat. As Western forces flooded into the Muslim world, it became increasingly clear that military might alone was insufficient. A failure to recognise the changing nature of the threat resulted in strategies that ultimately fell short of their intended goals.

Thus, when Sir David Omand built CONTEST, the UK’s first counter-terrorism strategy, the result was not a more aggressive military posture, but a broader conceptualisation of security. This was embodied within PREVENT, a strand of CONTEST which sought to intervene earlier in the threat cycle, targeting the conditions under which individuals become radicalised.

PREVENT’s significance wasn’t just operational; it was conceptual. It showed how security threats cannot be addressed at the point of manifestation alone. Instead, they must be managed across the full spectrum of society, from ideology and information to community dynamics and institutional trust.

This same logic must now be applied to military readiness. Populations must be educated about hybrid warfare if they are to resist it. To remain fixated on force alone is to prepare for a form of war that no longer exists. Military readiness isn’t about mobilising for war; it’s about building a society that can survive it.

By Archie Millett, April 2026

Archie Millett is a Masters student in the War Studies department at King’s College London. His research focuses on Middle Eastern insurgency, U.S. foreign policy, and the evolution of modern warfare.

Link to Archie's substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-195428438

[1] Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (2007), 11.

[2] Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century, 11.

[3] Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Vintage, 2008).

[4] Heljä Ossa and Agata Mazurkiewicz, “Prepared and Protected: The Role of Civil Preparedness in Finnish and Polish Security - Conflict and Civicness Research Blog,” Conflict and Civicness Research Blog - Understanding Civil Society and Peace Processes in Africa and the Middle East, September 8, 2025, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/crp/2025/09/08/prepared-and-protected-the-role-of-civil-

preparedness-in-finnish-and-polish-security/.

[5] Ossa and Mazurkiewicz, “Prepared and Protected”.

[6] Vessa Valtonen and Minna Branders, “Tracing the Finnish Comprehensive Security Model,” in Nordic Societal Security: Convergence and Divergence (Routledge, 2020).