Berlin outage: Can systems survive on efficiency alone? 

Tobias Steyer looks at why power outages and fuel disruptions reveal Europe’s weakness in modern conflict.


Image by OleksandrStudent | Freepik

On January 3, 2026, an arson attack took place on the Berlin power grid, leading to a power outage in over 40,000 households and 2,000 businesses across southwest Berlin, Germany. This was not exceptional. That is precisely the problem: factories halted, public life stalled, and economic damage ran into the hundreds of millions, not because of an extreme event, but because Europe has spent two decades optimising for efficiency rather than resilience.

What we’re witnessing in reality is a ‘stress test’ – one that Germany, and much of Europe keep failing. More troubling is the fact that the perpetrators have not been identified. Official findings remain vague, and political communication is cautious to the point of evasion. 

Only now is the possibility being acknowledged that these incidents may involve deliberate sabotage, potentially supported by foreign intelligence services. For years, such assumptions were dismissed as alarmist despite the fact that this playbook is anything, but new.

Across Europe, a consistent pattern has emerged: it does not involve open military assault or dramatic escalation, but rather localised blackouts, communication failures, cyber intrusions into municipal systems, and critical infrastructure disruptions. Individually, each incident appears manageable. Taken together, they reveal something more systematic: the deliberate probing of response times, redundancy, escalation thresholds and political resolve.

Modern conflict does not begin with armoured divisions. It begins with uncertainty, with the question of how quickly a state reacts, how long essential functions remain operational, and how resilient the population is when systems degrade. On those metrics, Europe’s answers are increasingly weak.

Looking at the past

Over the last twenty years, Germany and many other European states, including the UK, have drifted into a civil-structural vulnerability that cannot be explained by defence spending alone.

Across much of Europe, there are no functioning civil protection shelters or bunker systems, minimal redundancy in electricity, water and communications, and dismantled or hollowed-out emergency stockpiles. On the other hand, there is an increasing dependency on cheap imports without strategic buffers and supply chains which are optimised for just-in-time efficiency, not crisis continuity. The cascading effect is decisive. A power outage is not merely darkness; it is a loss of control. This leads to no co-ordination; hence, there is no defence, civilian or state. 

Such a situation stands in strong contrast to Western Europe’s past. In the 1960s and 1970s, supply security and crisis preparedness were treated as core state responsibilities. The logic behind this was simple: redundancy costs money, but loss of control costs sovereignty. 

This, however, has been systematically abandoned across Europe in favour of efficiency, market optimisation and political convenience. Resilience became unfashionable, something to be discussed, not built.

Current energy policy further emphasises this vulnerability. Across Europe, the focus is centred on generation capacity while neglecting grid resilience, redundancy, secured baseload and physical protection. In these cases, the enforcement of redundancy principles, such as the (n-1) rule, is not a technical detail but rather a minimum requirement for any advanced economy that takes security seriously.

Light at the end of the tunnel

The missing pillar here is military-grade operating competence and a strategic rethink of ‘peace-time’ infrastructure decisions. During the Cold War, European societies were repeatedly targeted through terrorism, disinformation, and clandestine operations designed to weaken institutions without triggering open war. Today’s version is technologically upgraded but strategically familiar. 

Europe cannot restore resilience without reintegrating military-grade operating capability into domestic crisis response and civil protection as an execution layer. To note: this is not a call for militarisation of politics, but for realism and governance discipline. While civilian systems are optimised for steady-state administration, armed forces can be optimised to stabilise failing systems fast, under ambiguity and at scale.

Aside from this, Europe requires a complete rethink of the structural ideologies behind its systems. The question to be answered is: How do we rebuild strategically with continuity, denial-resistance, and rapid restoration built in? For this, there are a few actions that can be taken. 

For starters, rebuild bridges and corridors as strategic assets. This means treating critical nodes as part of national operating capability. In the 1950s, key crossings on bridges were often designed with defence-relevant provisions, for example, anti-armour denial concepts, which enabled controlled management during crisis situations.

In today’s world, this needs to reflect modern realities: resilient repairability, controlled access, route redundancy, and counter-UAS-minded protection for exposed chokepoints (without publishing technical specifics). A bridge replacement programme should also be assessed against continuity metrics: ‘How fast can we reroute logistics?’, ‘How quickly can we restore minimum functions?’ and ‘Where are the single points of failure?’

Then, relearn that mobility infrastructure has dual-use value and design it accordingly. Europe once planned for rapid adaptation of civilian infrastructure under crisis pressure. Germany is a classic case: elements of the Autobahn network were historically conceived with contingency logic segments that could be adapted for emergency aviation use, and a nationwide network of service areas that supported refuelling and logistics.

A modern resilience architecture asks: Do our major corridors still allow rapid reconfiguration when parts of the system fail? Do we have distributed fuel logistics that work under disruption? Are rest stops/service areas treated as mere commercial real estate or as potential continuity nodes?

Moreover, the rollback of strategic pipeline, storage, and distribution logic over the last 25 years is a textbook example of efficiency winning over resilience. In Central Europe, segments of NATO-aligned fuel logistics infrastructure were reduced, disconnected, or left to age out when, in many cases, they could have remained economically useful in peacetime while preserving crisis continuity value.

This is the strategic question leaders must now answer: Why did we treat fuel continuity as a legacy cost centre rather than as a sovereign capability? Why did we allow critical segments to become non-operational instead of maintaining them as dual-use infrastructure? Energy policy is not only generation capacity. It is the ability to distribute energy and fuel under stress. Without that, baseload is theoretical.

In addition, across Europe, defence-linked properties were sold off as surplus. Germany’s Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (BImA) sold large inventories of former barracks and associated facilities; many locations were converted into housing and commercial districts. In real estate terms, this was rational. In resilience terms, it often meant the irreversible loss of protected sites suitable for logistics and storage, hardened or semi-protected spaces usable for communications and continuity, distributed locations that can support surge operations.

To note, again: this is not an argument against development. It is an argument for strategic retention and dual-use planning, keeping what matters, repurposing intelligently, and maintaining a ‘minimum viable backbone’ for continuity.

Lastly, reactivate what still exists and embed resilience into future city-building. Europe must do two things in parallel: On one hand, reactivate remaining strategic facilities and contingency capabilities that still exist quietly, professionally, and with clear legal governance. On the other hand, embed resilience-by-design into new urban development and infrastructure programmes so we stop building fragility into the next 30 years. Switzerland is the obvious benchmark: it kept a preparedness culture and institutional muscle memory that many European states allowed to atrophy. 

Bottom line: the military (intelligence) does not replace civilian authority. It stabilises civilian authority when systems fail. And, Europe’s infrastructure renewal must become a security-grade programme: strategic rebuilds, dual-use continuity, fuel logistics restoration, disciplined asset governance, and perimeter management.

Author’s note

I am writing this not as an outside observer, but as someone who was trained in a different security culture. In my own military education, including service as a military police officer, we learnt these scenarios explicitly: sabotage, subversion, the protection of critical infrastructure, command under degraded conditions, and the containment of small disruptions before they cascade into systemic failure.

We trained both the execution and the defence at the local level and at scale precisely because the core assumption was clear: an adversary does not seek immediate victory, but the erosion of state functionality.  That operational mindset has not disappeared from history; it has disappeared from civilian decision-making.

Tobias Steyer is a senior equity partner at SWIFT Group and served as a military police officer in the past.