Throughout 2025, Russia has conducted systematic campaigns across European civilian infrastructure that reveal fundamental flaws in how nations approach crisis management. In September alone: 19-23 drones violated Polish airspace, GPS jamming affected 123,000 flights across the Baltic region, Copenhagen and Oslo airports shut down for hours due to coordinated drone activity, and Russian fighter jets violated Estonian airspace.

What makes these incidents significant isn't their individual impact but the way they're orchestrated. Each event requires responses from civilian authorities (aviation control, maritime surveillance, border security, cybersecurity teams) all while preventing the recovery periods emergency management systems depend on. This isn't crisis management as we've known it. It's sustained operational pressure designed to overwhelm coordination systems built for discrete events.

Traditional emergency management would handle these as separate issues. Different agencies, different expertise, different response plans. But in the gray zone, they're all the same crisis. And that's exactly what they're designed to be.

When Coordination Systems Break Under Continuous Pressure

Denmark learned this reality when drones shut down Copenhagen Airport. Aviation authorities activated standard protocols, but this wasn't a standard incident. It connected to shadow fleet movements in Danish waters, cyber probes hitting government networks, and intelligence suggesting coordinated operations. Danish officials assessed the drone incidents as hybrid warfare involving systematic approaches by professional operators, not isolated events but patterns spanning aviation disruption and maritime operations.

The challenge exceeded any single agency's capability. Aviation authorities needed maritime intelligence. Port security required cyber threat awareness. Border control depended on supply chain data. Those organizational charts that work well during peacetime? They became obstacles under sustained multi-domain pressure.

Professionals adapted. Baltic states created informal coordination mechanisms moving faster than bureaucracy allows. Danish and Swedish maritime authorities share shadow fleet intelligence in near-real-time. Polish and Lithuanian transport officials coordinate alternative routes before formal agreements exist.

These aren't policy decisions. They're survival responses. And they're happening because existing structures can't handle continuous operational tempo.

What We're Seeing from Sweden

While emergency management professionals across Europe improvise solutions, Sweden appears to be systematically rebuilding its entire approach. Reports from Swedish government publications and international observers suggest something remarkable: a nation treating gray zone reality not as temporary disruption but as the new normal requiring a governance shift.

In late 2022, Sweden implemented what external sources describe as a major structural reform of civil defense and crisis preparedness. Then in December 2024, their parliament approved what's being reported as the most substantial defense reinforcement since the Cold War (more than $16 billion for military defense and nearly $4 billion for civil defense by 2030, converted from SEK at 2024-25 exchange rates).

But the striking element isn't the money. It's what appears to be a fundamental reorganization of how emergency management integrates into national governance.

The "Total Defence" Integration Model

External observers note that Sweden has reintroduced what they call "Total Defence," a Cold War concept being adapted for gray zone reality. From what we can see in published materials, this approach directly addresses the coordination failures other nations are experiencing by eliminating traditional separation between military defense and civilian crisis management.

According to public Swedish government materials distributed to every household in the country, their model operates on a simple principle: "During times of crisis or war, we all need to contribute to Sweden's resilience."

This isn't rhetoric. Reports suggest Sweden is implementing legal frameworks establishing that all residents can be called upon during crisis or war. Not just emergency services. Everyone. This creates distributed capacity rather than centralized surge response that burns out under sustained pressure.

Observable Structural Changes

From external reporting, several concrete organizational shifts stand out:

Unified Authority Structure: Sweden's civil contingencies agency is reportedly being renamed (effective January 2026) to explicitly signal its civil defense role. The agency appears to be establishing 26 "preparedness sectors" spanning energy, food, water, transport, healthcare, and financial systems, each with designated agencies responsible for continuity under all conditions, not just emergencies.

Municipal Integration: Reports indicate every Swedish municipality must maintain crisis management councils, conduct risk assessments every four years, and demonstrate readiness for both discrete events and sustained pressure. This shifts local government into crisis governance infrastructure rather than emergency response coordination.

Private Sector Obligations: Swedish materials suggest critical infrastructure operators have preparedness obligations legally integrated into civil defense, moving beyond compliance to partnership.

Household Preparedness: The widely reported distribution of "If Crisis or War Comes" to 5.5 million households states explicitly that citizens should be self-sufficient for at least one week. This isn't guidance; it's the foundation of a system designed to function when centralized services are overwhelmed.

Learning from Ukraine

Perhaps most tellingly, Sweden has published multiple reports explicitly analyzing Ukrainian experiences to inform their reforms. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency released findings in 2023 and 2025 examining how Ukraine's defense has held under sustained pressure.

Three lessons appear to be driving Swedish reforms:

First: Civilian populations and infrastructure will be directly targeted in gray zone and wartime scenarios. Traditional assumptions that "rear areas" remain safe don't hold.

Second: Early preparation enables wartime resilience. You cannot improvise total defense after pressure begins.

Third: Civil defense requires both adaptability and endurance. Surge capacity isn't enough when operations sustain for months or years.

Beyond Sweden: What This Means for Emergency Management

What makes Sweden's approach significant isn't that it's uniquely Nordic. It's that they appear to be treating gray zone reality as permanent operating conditions requiring governance change rather than temporary crisis requiring emergency response.

This distinction matters.

Emergency management built on surge capacity assumes crises end. Staffing rotates home. Systems recover. But when pressure persists across multiple domains for weeks or months, traditional models collapse. You can't surge indefinitely.

Finland, Norway, and Denmark are reportedly implementing similar "total defence" concepts, creating regional coordination that addresses the informal Baltic cooperation mechanisms emergency managers are already creating by necessity.

Five Patterns Worth Watching

From Sweden's observable approach, several patterns emerge that transcend national context:

1. Integration Over Coordination: Rather than coordinating emergency management with security agencies during crisis, integrate emergency management into security governance permanently. Sweden's approach appears to place both military and civil defense under unified Ministry of Defence oversight.

2. Distributed Capacity Over Centralized Surge: Legal frameworks establishing whole-of-society responsibilities create depth. When everyone has defined roles during crisis, you're not dependent on burning out your specialists.

3. Sector Resilience Over Agency Response: Instead of emergency services responding to failures, establish sector-level preparedness obligations. Energy, food, water, transport, healthcare (each maintains continuity planning for sustained operations under pressure).

4. Municipal Crisis Governance Infrastructure: Turn local government from emergency coordination point to embedded crisis governance capability. This means councils, recurring assessments, and demonstrated readiness as standard governance function.

5. Private Partnership Over Regulatory Compliance: Critical infrastructure operators become civil defense partners with legal preparedness obligations, not just regulated entities that emergency managers coordinate with during incidents.

The Fundamental Question

The challenge facing emergency management isn't whether Sweden's specific approach is replicable elsewhere. Different legal systems, political cultures, and threat perceptions will produce different solutions.

The question is whether emergency management as a profession recognizes that gray zone reality requires governance change, not just improved emergency response.

2025's Baltic incidents revealed what Sweden appears to have already concluded: when adversaries can sustain multi-domain pressure indefinitely, emergency management must evolve from episodic response coordination to continuous security governance partnership.

Denmark couldn't coordinate its way out of coordinated drone operations, shadow fleet movements, and cyber intrusions happening simultaneously. Neither can any other nation relying on structures designed for discrete events.

The professionals adapting through informal coordination, cross-border intelligence sharing, and improvised solutions? They're already writing the new operating procedures. The question is whether institutions will formalize these adaptations or force emergency managers to keep improvising around structures that no longer match operational reality.

Sweden's observable shift suggests one nation has answered that question. They're not waiting for the next crisis to prove their current structures inadequate. They're rebuilding governance to match the world as it is, not as they wish it were.

For emergency management professionals watching from outside, the Swedish approach offers not a blueprint to copy but a mirror reflecting what sustained gray zone pressure demands: fundamental rethinking of where emergency management sits in governance, how capability is distributed across society, and what "prepared" means when crises don't end.

The infrastructure for that evolution already exists, in the informal coordination networks Baltic professionals are building, in the cross-domain intelligence sharing that happens despite bureaucratic boundaries, in the private sector partnerships forming by necessity.

What's missing is the institutional recognition that these aren't temporary workarounds to be formalized later. They're the foundation of emergency management's evolution from discrete event coordination to embedded security governance partnership.

Some nations are making that evolution explicit. Others are letting it emerge from practitioner adaptation. Both paths lead to the same destination: emergency management becoming integral to how governments maintain authority and provide services under continuous pressure, not just during declared emergencies.

The only question is how much practitioners will have to improvise before institutions catch up.

References and Further Reading

Swedish Government. (2024, December). Total defence decision 2025-2030. https://www.government.se/government-policy/total-defence/defence-resolution-2025-20302/

Swedish Government. (n.d.). Total defence overview. https://www.government.se/government-policy/total-defence/

Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. (2024, November). If crisis or war comes: Household preparedness brochure. http://msb.se

Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. (2023, September). Building resilience for the future: Lessons from Ukraine. https://www.msb.se/siteassets/dokument/publikationer/english-publications/building-resilience-for-the-future---lessons-from-ukraine.pdf

Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. (2025, January). Developing Sweden's civil defence: Lessons from Ukraine. https://www.msb.se/en/news/2025/january/developing-swedens-civil-defence-lessons-from-ukraine/

Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. (2022, October). Structural reform of civil defence and crisis preparedness. https://www.msb.se/sv/amnesomraden/krisberedskap--civilt-forsvar/det-svenska-civila-beredskapssystemet/strukturreform-av-krisberedskap-och-civilt-forsvar/

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (2024, November). Death by a thousand paper cuts: Lessons from the Nordic-Baltic region on countering Russian gray zone aggression. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/11/russia-gray-zone-aggression-baltic-nordic?lang=en

National Defense University. (2020, January). Baltics left of bang: Nordic total defense and implications for the Baltic Sea region. https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=strategic-forums