Yesterday afternoon, our power went out after a large storm passed through our area of the Northern Neck of Virginia. We’re fortunate because we have a propane-powered generator and some of our power for essentials were uninterrupted. It’s a price worth paying when you look at the weathered crops that were blessed with a downpour of rain in recent hours. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow expressed this idea well in his poem, “The Rainy Day”
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Somedays must be dark and dreary.
The drought is dark and dreary for farmers. The rain was a blessing and losing power was worth the trouble. My shining sun is the generator I have for moments like this. As the US Coast Guard’s motto says, Semper Paratus, “always ready.”
We take so much for granted in America. The light switch works, until it doesn’t. Water flows through the tap until there’s no power to pump it. The food keeps in the refrigerator until the compressor fails for lack of power. And your cell phone is remarkable until the battery is dead with no way to charge it.
Most of us understand these limitations in our daily lives, but rarely do we give them a second thought. After all, it’s just a switch, tap, or door away. Yet what about the next level of operations? What about the line and electric substations that bring power to our homes? What if the water conduits fail that carry that precious resource? What about the sewer lines that transport our waste to processing facilities? What happens when all of that fails?
And of course, there’s the infrastructure that produces the power, using both fossil fuels and renewables, the former far more dependable than the latter. Or the dams that not only use hydropower to generate electricity but also act as reservoirs to ensure we have adequate water resources to distribute to countless people?
All of this is important and just a finger’s reach in away from us in our homes. But it’s also at the fingertips of enemy keyboards far from our homeland. Those who deal with national security are very concerned with what our adversaries might do to disrupt our infrastructure including power, water, electronic, and communications.
How would that happen? Over the internet with disruptive software interference and other malware that can be embedded in the computerized systems via the internet, or other technologies that can be inserted into networks that control much of our infrastructure. Do you want to make a country’s water system fail? Insert a bug in the system that overpowers the pumps until they fail and can no longer function properly. Want to stop the flow of natural gas or oil and shut down the more than 190,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines traversing the US? Not hard. We tend to think about malware and viruses as a problem for our computers, the ones we rely on every day. That’s why most of us have antivirus software that works to instantaneously intercept actions that disrupt our computers where many of us store sensitive information.
Which brings me to this. The first thing we will see in the “next war” that unambiguously involves the US will be the enemy’s use of malware to shutdown vast swaths of our critical infrastructure. It will be much more than disabling the switch at our fingertips. It will extend into every aspect of our lives. The potential for a catastrophe is huge with just the loss of electricity and water alone. The secondary effects are almost too mindboggling to contemplate, and no amount of homebased backup will resolve the problem. Why? Well, that generator that is providing me with power needs propane gas to operate. And when the propane company’s own infrastructure fails and they can’t pump propane into their trucks, my generator will fail as well. So too with the electricity that operates my well pump.
Both China and Russia, to say nothing of Iran, North Korea, and state-sponsored terror organizations all pose a threat to our vital national infrastructure. So, for those who think that America needs to stay out of conflicts and mind our own business, you should know that our enemies are minding their own business to disrupt ours. And that involves upending our infrastructure in the first salvo in the next war that is almost certain to come our way.
If there was ever a time to heed the warning of those in our national security structure who worry about cyberattacks against our infrastructure, it is now. After all. The threat is merely a finger’s length away.
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