CIVIL PREPAREDNESS AND RESILIENCE

Civil preparedness and resilience you can rehearse, on one picture shared by the council and everyone it works with.

NATO and the UK government now treat civil preparedness as part of national security, and much of the work lands on councils, Local Resilience Forums, critical services and the voluntary sector. Sinkaos gives them one shared operational picture that keeps working through a long power cut or a network outage, so plans can be exercised and then used.

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ON THE GROUND

Resilience is set nationally and delivered street by street.

NATO’s seven baseline requirements for national resilience ask Allies to keep government running, energy, food, water, communications and transport working, and to cope with mass casualties and large movements of people. The UK, a founding member of the Alliance, has its own programme on top: the Resilience Framework of 2022, the Resilience Action Plan of July 2025, and a Home Defence Programme with a national exercise planned for 2027. Households are asked through the government’s Be Ready campaign to be able to manage for three days while help reaches those who need it most.

In practice the work falls to a district council opening a rest centre for people evacuated from the next valley, to a water company running bowsers through a long outage, to a charity feeding a sports hall full of evacuees. They use different tools on different networks and often meet properly for the first time during the incident itself.

Two things tend to fail first: the shared picture of who is doing what where, and the communications that picture depends on. Read the background in our guide to NATO resilience requirements.

BASELINE REQUIREMENTS

NATO’s seven baseline requirements, at local level.

What each requirement means for a council, a utility or a charity, and where Sinkaos helps, if it does.

REQUIREMENT	WHAT IT MEANS LOCALLY	WHERE SINKAOS HELPS
Continuity of government and critical government services	The council and its incident team keep deciding and acting when buildings, power or networks fail	Operations that run offline and on a local field node, with roles, tasks and a decision record
Resilient energy supplies	Outage response, generators for critical sites, priority customers	Tracks generators, fuel runs and repair crews; cannot supply power
Dealing with uncontrolled movement of people	Rest centres, registration, transport and accommodation for evacuated or displaced people	Reception points, tasks and counters on the map; it is not a population register
Resilient food and water resources	Bottled water and bowsers, distribution points, stock and expiry	Distribution points, inventory with quantities and expiry, delivery routes
Mass casualties and disruptive health crises	Supporting the NHS with transport, shelters and volunteers	Coordinates support teams and logistics; not a medical or triage record
Resilient civil communications systems	Staying coordinated when mobile networks are overloaded or down	Offline-first apps, store and forward, local Wi-Fi nodes that sync when a link returns
Resilient transport systems	Closures, detours, evacuation routes, fuel and vehicle availability	Closures and hazards change routes, offline routing, vehicle readiness

Requirements as listed by NATO. Sinkaos supports the people delivering them; it does not by itself make an organisation meet any of them.

EXERCISE

A 72-hour regional blackout exercise.

T-14 d

Plan with alternatives

The district council, the water company and a relief charity build one plan: bottled water stations, generator sites, bowser routes. Plan B covers a closed bridge, plan C a missing bowser.

Mission planningPlan A, B, C
T-1 d

Packs on every phone, a node at the council offices

Each participant downloads offline maps and tasks. A laptop node at the council offices will serve the incident team over local Wi-Fi when the internet is gone.

Mission packsField node
Hour 0

The grid and mobile data go down

The exercise control switches off internet access. Teams keep reporting; reports queue on phones and on the node.

OfflineTraining mode
Hour 9

A link comes back at the depot

The water company’s depot gets a satellite link. Its node syncs with headquarters; late reports go onto the timeline at the time they were made.

SyncTwo timestamps
Hour 30

Switch to plan B

An inject closes the bridge. The plan check shows plan B still has enough drivers; the switch is recorded with who decided and why.

InjectsDecision points
Day 4

Debrief from the record

Plan versus actual, gaps in coverage, findings with owners and deadlines.

DebriefLessons learned

Nodes screen: three nodes (HQ online, FIELD A synced over satellite, FIELD B with link down and 42 changes queued) above a list of reports that arrived late, each with the time it happened, the time it arrived and the delay. — Three nodes, one out of contact. Demo data.

FEATURES

Built for organisations that have to keep going.

Works without the network

Phones work offline with maps, tasks and team lists. A disconnected node runs a whole operation on a laptop with no internet.

One picture across organisations

Council, utility and charity in one operation, each with its own roles. Partners join as time-limited guests.

Plans you can rehearse

Plans with objectives and alternatives, what-if rehearsal, and a training mode that keeps exercises clearly apart from real events.

Logistics in the same place

Inventory, consumables, vehicles and generators with expected and actual location.

Working alongside the military

APP-6 military symbols next to civilian ones, MGRS coordinates, and two-way Cursor on Target exchange with TAK-family apps. See civil-military cooperation.

Where your data lives

Hosted in the EU, on your own servers, or fully disconnected. Messages and files are end-to-end encrypted. Details on the security page.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Where Sinkaos stops.

No certification or accreditation

Sinkaos is not NATO-certified or accredited and is not approved for classified information. It is a tool for unclassified civilian coordination.

Not a warning or dispatch system

Emergency Alerts, flood warnings and 999 calls stay with the national systems and the emergency services.

Not a compliance guarantee

It helps you plan, exercise and document. Meeting your duties under the Civil Contingencies Act or the NIS Regulations remains your organisation’s work.

Phones still need power

Offline mode handles a missing signal. Flat batteries are another matter, so plan charging.

IN PRACTICE

What it gets used for.

Power outage exercisesRest centresBottled water distributionGenerator and fuel logisticsShelter managementVolunteer coordinationWorking alongside the armed forcesLRF multi-agency exercises

FAQ

What people ask about civil preparedness.

Is Sinkaos a military system?

No. It is a civilian field-operations app. It can show APP-6 symbols and exchange positions with TAK apps so civilian teams and military users can see each other, but it does not handle classified information.

Can it run if the internet is down for days?

Yes, on a local node with phones connected over Wi-Fi. Maps and data have to be prepared in advance, and the node syncs with others when any link returns.

Can several organisations work in one operation?

Yes. Each organisation keeps its own roles and data rules, and guests from partners get limited, time-bound access.

Does it help us meet NATO or UK government expectations?

It supports the people and plans behind them: exercises, coordination and records. It does not certify or guarantee compliance with anything.