When governments start handing out survival pamphlets and massively increasing military spending, one has to wonder: Do they know something they’re not telling us?

In November 2024, Sweden distributed a booklet titled In Case of Crisis or War to 5.2 million households. It advised citizens how to survive without electricity, running water, food supplies or functioning communications, and encouraged families to prepare for at least a week without outside assistance.

This wasn’t some fringe survivalist publication. It was official government advice, delivered directly into people’s homes.

But Sweden isn’t alone.

Norway recently distributed updated emergency preparedness advice to millions of households. Finland published a national crisis survival guide, explicitly including military conflict among the scenarios citizens should prepare for. Germany and France have also updated their civilian emergency preparedness guidance, while the UK has launched a national campaign encouraging households to stockpile enough provisions to prepare for any major disruptions to essential services.

In July 2026 in Australia, the government also conducted a nationwide test of its new AusAlert emergency warning system, designed to send emergency notifications directly to mobile phones, including overriding silent and do-not-disturb settings.

In September 2026, reports emerged of a Pentagon initiative known as FORTRESS America, designed to improve the resilience of American military installations during prolonged disruptions to civilian infrastructure. The programme reportedly includes plans for military bases to maintain essential operations independently for up to 90 days, with greater energy independence, stronger supply chains and emergency stockpiles.

So the American military itself is preparing for scenarios in which civilian electricity grids, communications networks, transport systems and supply chains may no longer be reliable. Not for a few hours, for 3 months.

When governments across multiple continents begin actively preparing their civilian populations for crises, including military conflict, I think we should be paying attention.

But I do find it rather unsettling that ordinary citizens are being encouraged to prepare enough emergency supplies to last three days to a week, whilst the American military is planning for disruptions lasting three months.

And it’s not just survival pamphlets and emergency stockpiles. Look at what governments are spending on their military defense.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military expenditure reached a staggering US$2.887 trillion in 2025. That’s an increase of 41% over the past decade. European military spending alone has more than doubled since 2016.

Then, in June 2025, NATO members committed to working towards spending 5% of their GDP on defence and security-related expenditure by 2035. A dramatic increase from the previous 2% benchmark. Why the increase?

These are extraordinary financial commitments coming from governments already struggling with mounting public debt, housing shortages, ageing populations, increasingly expensive healthcare and welfare systems, and rising inflation.

Why are they suddenly so willing to redirect enormous amounts of public money towards preparing for conflict?

A short history lesson:

For much of the past three decades, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western countries enjoyed what became known as the peace dividend. The Cold War was over, the threat of another major conflict between global superpowers appeared to diminish, and governments could redirect resources away from military preparedness towards improving their societies.

But now, that trend appears to be reversing. And what concerns me most is that these decisions are being made by governments with access to some of the most sophisticated intelligence, military analysis and geopolitical forecasting capabilities in the world. These aren’t random people making decisions based on newspaper headlines. They’re surrounded by military strategists, intelligence agencies, economists and diplomatic advisers whose entire purpose is to anticipate threats and assess future risks.

And across multiple continents, they’re reaching the same conclusions. They need more weapons. More military capabilities. Stronger defences. And populations better prepared for the possibility of war.

Russia is the most obvious explanation for Europe’s military buildup. Its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered the belief that territorial conquest on European soil was largely a thing of the past. But concerns extend far beyond Russia.

Donald Trump’s repeated questioning of America’s obligations to its NATO allies has introduced uncertainty into an arrangement that has underpinned international security for generations.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China continues to expand its naval, missile and technological capabilities. And it’s increasingly assertive position towards Taiwan has raised the possibility of a Taiwan invasion in the near future.

Taiwan isn’t just strategically important because of its location. It produces a substantial proportion of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, the tiny chips underpinning everything from smartphones and artificial intelligence to sophisticated military weapons. Everyone wants it. Both China and America have enormous strategic and economic interests in controlling access to this technology.

But perhaps the greatest danger isn’t a war involving Russia or China individually, in isolation. What happens if several conflicts erupt simultaneously, during a time of poor economic conditions for the west, and the alliances we’ve relied upon for the past 100 years have fallen apart?

Imagine China moving against Taiwan. The United States intervenes, officially to defend Taiwan, but with an enormous strategic interest in protecting access to advanced semiconductor technology. But with the US also massively drained from resources due to its recent invasion of Iran and its accumulating debt problem.

Meanwhile, Russia sees an opportunity to increase military pressure on Europe. We would naturally assume America would help defend European allies against Russian aggression. After all, that’s the fundamental principle upon which NATO was established. But would Trump?

Trump has repeatedly criticised European NATO members and questioned America’s obligations to allies. Besides if they were tied up with a war against China. How could they help? If America became heavily engaged in a conflict with China, it’s likely Trump would decide that defending Europe simply isn’t in America’s best interests.

I don’t think it’s an entirely unreasonable scenario to consider. Particularly when governments themselves appear to be preparing for a future in which longstanding alliances can no longer be taken for granted.

And there’s another dimension to modern warfare that I think deserves considerably more attention. It’s likely that the next world war doesn’t begin with missiles, tanks or soldiers crossing borders. What if it begins with the lights going out?

In October 2026, reports emerged of cyberattacks affecting refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets. Hackers reportedly manipulated computer-controlled refrigeration equipment, triggering prolonged defrost cycles and causing temperatures to rise dramatically. Food was destroyed, businesses suffered losses, and equipment was reportedly damaged.

Around the same period, the Pentagon was investigating suspicious refrigeration failures at several American military installations. Those incidents had occurred earlier, in August, and investigators were examining whether malicious interference was responsible.

If hackers can remotely manipulate refrigeration equipment, what else could a sophisticated state-sponsored cyber operation interfere with?

Modern societies depend on interconnected computer systems to manage electricity, water treatment, hospitals, financial transactions, telecommunications, transport and food distribution.

A sufficiently sophisticated cyberattack could potentially disrupt water pumping stations, disable hospital information systems, interrupt electronic payments, interfere with fuel distribution or bring sections of an electricity network offline.

AI could enable hostile actors to identify vulnerabilities faster, automate aspects of cyberattacks and coordinate disruption across multiple systems.

Imagine waking up one morning to discover that your electricity isn’t working. You turn on the tap, but there’s no water pressure. Your phone has no reception. Your bank’s payment systems are unavailable. Supermarkets cannot process transactions. Fuel stations can’t operate their pumps. Hospitals are relying on emergency generators, but deliveries of diesel are being disrupted because logistics systems are offline. Within days, food begins spoiling. Emergency services struggle to coordinate their responses. Businesses close.

It sounds like the plot of a dystopian science-fiction novel. But many of the individual vulnerabilities are real.

And the American intelligence community has already warned about state-sponsored hackers establishing access to critical infrastructure networks, potentially enabling disruption during a future military conflict.

A series of coordinated attacks could trigger cascading failures, where the loss of one essential service causes others to stop functioning. This is likely one of the reasons military planners are so concerned about maintaining operations when civilian infrastructure fails.

There is, of course, an important counterargument to all of this.

Military spending doesn’t necessarily mean governments expect war. The principle of deterrence is that a country sufficiently prepared to defend itself is less likely to be attacked. And perhaps that’s precisely what we’re witnessing today.

But there’s a rather dangerous contradiction in this logic.

When one country increases its military capabilities in the name of defence, its adversaries may interpret those preparations as a threat. They respond by increasing their own military spending, which then reinforces the original country’s suspicions. And so the cycle continues.

It’s known as the security dilemma, and history offers some uncomfortable examples.

In the years preceding the First World War, European powers invested heavily in expanding their military capabilities, developing increasingly sophisticated weapons and establishing complicated networks of military alliances. Each country believed it was protecting its own national interests. Yet when a political crisis eventually emerged, those military preparations, growing mistrust and alliance commitments helped transform a regional confrontation into a global catastrophe.

At what point does preparing to prevent a war actually begin to make that war more likely?

We have spent decades building an increasingly interconnected global economy, based on the assumption that economic cooperation and mutual dependence would discourage major conflict. Yet we’re now watching countries reduce their dependence on strategic rivals, reconsider longstanding alliances, expand military production and prepare their civilian populations for the possibility of war.

The international relationships that have maintained relative peace between the world’s major powers for much of our lifetimes are beginning to unravel. And I wonder whether future generations will look back at this period and recognise warning signs that we failed to appreciate.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

– Attributed to Albert Einstein

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Are We Gearing Up for War? was originally published in The Geopolitical Economist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.