The Risk Of EMP And Cyber Attacks Loom With Little Protection

When Will America Protect Itself Against EMP, Cyber, & Ransomware Attacks?

 Peter Pry,

“A long-term outage owing to EMP could disable most critical supply chains, leaving the U.S. population living in conditions similar to centuries past, prior to the advent of electric power. In the 1800s, the U.S. population was less than 60 million, and those people had many skills and assets necessary for survival without today’s infrastructure. An extended blackout today could result in the death of a large fraction of the American people through the effects of societal collapse, disease and starvation. While national planning and preparation for such events could help mitigate the damage, few such actions are currently under way or even being contemplated.”

- Congressional EMP Commission (2017)

So why is Colonial Pipeline vulnerable to Russian hackers, and the Texas electric grid vulnerable to ice storms, and all the nation’s life-sustaining critical infrastructure vulnerable to EMP and cyber attacks?

Ambassador Cooper says he has lost faith that Washington will ever act to protect the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures from EMP and cyber warfare. According to Cooper, if America is to be protected, it won’t be done by an incompetent federal government but by the people and the states, working “from the bottom up.”

The problem may be that there are too many lawyers and non-expert bureaucrats in charge of national preparedness for EMP and cyber warfare who lack deep technical expertise. The problem may be that lawyers are not forged in a national security culture that gives highest priority to winning a World War III. Lawyers are taught negotiation, compromise, achieving consensus among all stakeholders — which means critical infrastructure never will be protected.

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