The terms security and resilience are often used together, in particular at the national level. Both share common roots and requirements: the need to assess threats and vulnerabilities; the need to develop plans and procedures; and the need to have access to accurate and timely information.

The US military’s revised Field Manual 3 07 recognises that troubled, failing and ungoverned states threaten US national security interests; it justifies the need to develop national and local capacities and to leave behind appropriate forms of governance and resilient capabilities to withstand future hardships and disruptive challenges. In the UK, the new Civil Contingencies law, doctrine and operational procedures consider the security of the UK and resilience as interdependent. The security of critical infrastructure and the use of key national resources including the military working alongside the emergency services and civil society organisations are central to building national and community resilience.

In Australia there has been a convergence of national security and resilience. On 4 December 2008 in his first national security statement to Parliament, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd defined the security of Australia and its people in a broad sense to include threats to human security other than attacks from foreign states and terrorist acts.  Such non-traditional threats include attacks on critical infrastructure and information systems, transnational crime including the trafficking of people, drugs and arms, and the impact of climate change which may bring unregulated population movements, declining food production, reductions in arable land, violent weather patterns and resulting catastrophic events.

There are advantages in bringing together national security and resilience. First, the large investment which governments are making in national security, such as hardening their country’s critical infrastructure including utilities and transport, is also making each country more resilient. Also, by bringing together resilience and national security, governments are better able to encourage a greater degree of standardisation and interoperability between first responders such as the police, fire authorities, health bodies and volunteer emergency services.

There are, however, significant areas of difference and departure between national security and resilience. The threats to national security are usually inspired by the security forces or agents of other countries, terrorists or anarchists who aim to destabilise a government and its people, and national security aims to block or defeat such threats. In contrast, resilience involves an ongoing process of assessing a broad range of risks and threats, preparing to face such threats, accepting that some threats will become disruptive events, reducing the impact of events when they occur, and then recovering afterwards.