Lessons Learned from Coherent Resilience Tabletop Exercises in the Baltic Region

Current geopolitical environment in the Baltic Sea region requires continuous actions to build and enhance resilience of energy infrastructure. Tabletop Exercise proved to be an important tool that can bring together all the stakeholders and foster resilience through cooperation, sharing and networking of neighbouring states or regions. A Tabletop Exercise is a facilitated discussion-based exercise conducted in a stress-free environment. The NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence (NATO ENSEC COE) and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) have jointly organised three tabletop exercises in the Baltic region addressing resilience and energy security. The exercises were conducted every two years in 2019, 2021 and 2023. All three exercises were evaluated by a team from Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). This paper presents three tabletop exercises and their major outcomes. A tabletop exercise (TTX) is an informal, discussion-based exercise in which a team discusses their roles and responses during an emergency or crisis, considering several examples of potentially risky situations. The atmosphere is collegial and exploratory, and is not meant to put participants in the mindset they’d have during a real crisis event. Tabletop exercises are used to prepare for crises, with primary aim to identify gaps in legislation and share best practices among the participants [1]. A TTX is in particular useful tool to discuss and prepare for crisis events that might affect several countries having different legal, governance and emergency response systems that need to interact and work together in case of real event. TTX not only serves as a perfect networking event, it could also serve to spark and set up intergovernmental agreements for common crisis response. Coherent Resilience (CORE) is a series of national and regional level tabletop exercises (TTXs) aimed at enhancing resilience of energy systems in an era of hybrid threats. CORE TTXs have been conducted in Ukraine as well as national and regional programs in the Baltic States and other countries. The main objective of this study is to provide an overview of the three exercises completed in the Baltic Sea region in the period of 2019-2023 and evaluate their importance and effect in increasing resilience and energy security in the region. As the main focus of the exercises is to improve resilience of energy systems, resilience is understood as system’s ability to withstand external shocks and continue to provide services as long as possible, see more details in [2].