The Alarms We Don't Hear
Quick answer: What does John Fenzel mean by “the alarms we don't hear”?
Contrasting Belgium's carefully curated WWII battlefields with Ukraine, where air-raid alerts barely interrupt conversation, John argues the post-WWII systems built to stop armies at visible borders are wearing down against conflict that ignores clear lines. Those systems still exist, he writes, but they only hold if people keep maintaining them.
John was recently in Belgium, walking ground that has had 81 years to settle. Tanks sit cleaned and labeled. Forests fill old fields of fire. Signs tell you what happened, and visitors lower their voices. When you leave, the war stays behind the fence. A few months earlier he was in Ukraine. His phone buzzed with an alert he didn't recognize, and no one around him broke stride. Conversations continued. That's what unsettled him: how little it interrupted anything. War there lives in the background, like weather. One landscape has been cataloged and put away; the other lives in a permanent present tense. John remembers readiness from his Army years in West Germany as quiet, repetitive work that never drifted. The systems built after World War II were designed to stop armies at visible borders, and they did, for a long time. Now they're wearing down against conflict that ignores clear lines, where decisions cycle in minutes and human hesitation is engineered out. The structures still stand. None of it is automatic.
Why it matters for leaders: Systems that prevent catastrophe are only as strong as the people who keep maintaining them and answering signals early.
Q: What did readiness mean when John served in West Germany?
A: Quiet, repeated work: checking vehicles, packing and repacking, rehearsing until hands knew where everything belonged.
Q: How did an MI6 official describe today's environment?
A: “A space between peace and war.”
Read the full article on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alarms-we-dont-hear-john-fenzel-qbk3e
By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation