ADAPTING COOPERATION TO NEW THREATS
While digital technology has helped to enhance disaster relief, it has also created new vulnerabilities. If coordination is the most important ingredient for achieving mission success in a complex operating environment, the systems that enable coordination must be protected.
This is why the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus’ (ADMM-Plus) Expert Working Group (EWG) on Cyber Security was included in this inaugural iteration of XTR.
A potential breakdown mid-operation to the OPERA system would be catastrophic, leaving teams spread across a chaotic disaster zone isolated and essentially forced to work blind. So while some soldiers were out in the field, others were conducting daily cyber assessments to ensure that systems and networks are sufficiently hardened, especially in the case that there is a malicious cyber actor trying to cause further instability by disrupting the relief efforts.
Perhaps more crucially, significant efforts have been made to ensure cyber hygiene, and to sieve out mis- and dis-information. For example, AI-generated videos falsely depicted the scale and location of devastation following the earthquake in Myanmar in March 2025, making aid delivery more challenging when credible information was already perceived to be scarce.
One highly encouraging feature of XTR was that 19 countries participated, meaning that every member state of the ADMM-Plus including China, Russia and the United States took part despite broader geopolitical tensions.
ASEAN’s reputation as a neutral convener allowed it to bring together disparate actors, even those with trust deficits. At a time when multilateral cooperation is called into question, initiatives like XTR lay the quiet groundwork to help Southeast Asians when the need arises.
Lim Junli is a Research Fellow with the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Programme and Ian Li is a Research Fellow with the Military Studies Programme. Both programmes are part of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
