Rehearsing the Unthinkable

What happens when war reaches beyond the battlefield? At Common Effort 2026, military and civilian leaders will confront the decisions they hope they will never have to make.

A hospital director, a railway planner and an army officer sit around the same table. It is 1 April 2027. War threatens the Baltic region, and they have ninety minutes to decide what happens next.

The power grid is failing. The military needs trains to move troops and ammunition, while thousands of civilians are trying to flee. Hospitals are running out of beds, fuel supplies are dwindling, and every decision comes at someone else's expense.

Who gets priority? Who has the authority to decide? And what happens when the needs of the military clash with those of the civilian population?

These are precisely the questions participants will face during Common Effort 2026, where civilian and military representatives will join 1 German-Netherlands Corps for a day of scenario-based training. Their tools are simple: a map, a series of incident cards and, most importantly, conversation.

We tend to think of war as something fought by soldiers on distant battlefields. Ukraine has demonstrated just how misleading that assumption can be. Modern warfare reaches deep into civilian society, affecting power stations, ports, railway networks, hospitals and digital infrastructure. Armies depend on civilian resources to operate, while civilian authorities depend on the military to provide security.

Both sides have plans. But how often have they tested whether those plans actually work together when a crisis unfolds?

At Common Effort, that crisis begins on a fictional 1 April 2027, as tensions in the Baltic region escalate towards open conflict. While the Corps prepares for deployment and possible military operations, civilian authorities struggle to maintain essential services, manage growing uncertainty and keep society functioning.

The exercise brings everyone together in one room, organised around six interconnected themes: government and command, critical infrastructure, crisis management, logistics, medical care and societal resilience. Military officers, government officials and civilian experts work side by side, each bringing their own responsibilities, priorities and constraints.

Over three rounds, the situation deteriorates. Each round introduces new developments, or shocks, designed to confront participants with difficult but plausible dilemmas. A railway line cannot simultaneously carry military reinforcements and evacuating civilians. A hospital cannot reserve the same beds for wounded soldiers and local patients. A fuel shortage forces choices between keeping emergency services running and sustaining military operations.

Participants must negotiate, coordinate and make decisions, often with incomplete information and competing priorities. Just as they begin to find solutions, the scenario evolves, forcing them to reconsider their assumptions and adapt.

There are no winners or losers. And that is precisely the point.

The value of the exercise lies not in finding the perfect answer, but in discovering how well civilian and military organisations can work together under pressure. It reveals where responsibilities overlap, where coordination breaks down and where plans depend on assumptions that have never been tested. Sometimes the most important discovery is a missing phone number, an unclear mandate or a decision nobody realised they were expected to make.

Better to uncover those weaknesses around a conference table than in the middle of a real crisis.

The scenario may be fiction. The challenges it exposes are anything but.