After years of shrugs over concerns about the potential calamity an attack on the nation’s electric grid would cause, government and business leaders are joining to map a path to protect and maintain the system that powers everything from cellular phones to nuclear missile bases.
At a potentially game-changing three-day summit, government and business leaders gathered just outside Washington’s I-495 beltway this week to come up with quick fixes to protect the grid and address the larger issue of the impact a long shutdown would have.
“This is one of the conversations of our age,” said Lt. Gen. Steven L. Kwast, who heads the Air Education and Training Command and Air University, which sponsored the summit.
“As we move into the digital world, the digital network world, the 21st century, as we are held to be accountable to defend our economy, our government, our sovereign soil and our people, this dependency becomes part of our conversation,” he said in an interview.
Kwast has created “Project Spartacus” to address an electromagnetic pulse type attack of the grid, either from an enemy or terrorist group or solar storm. At his summit, 40 national organizations and 150 governmental officials met in the largest official EMP meeting of its kind.
The mostly classified summit wasn’t called due to any new threat from four likely users of an EMP weapon — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — but because there is greater attention to the issue as Americans, business and government becomes more and more dependent on electricity to power even their social connections.
“This gathering is not intended to be provocative or somehow secretly signal that we’ve fallen off a cliff,” Kwast emphasized.
But it did come as intelligence leaders are raising new fears of an attack and as business and some in the military are beginning to make plans for a lights out event.
Also on Tuesday, for example, a Senate subcommittee met to consider cyber and other threats to the grid. Thomas A. Fanning, chairman of Southern Company, said efforts are being made to create backup electric systems that would be able to supply some power to aid in a recovery after an attack.
That is key, according to former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, who also helped host Air University’s U.S. Electromagnetic Defense Task Force summit in Potomac, Md.
“If you have 30 to 40 percent of the electricity, you may end up having cold showers and warm beer but at least you can continue to function and rebuild. If the whole grid goes down, you are back in the dark ages literally and figuratively,” he told Secrets during the summit.
“If you end up with zero instead of 40 percent, for example, it’s not just that you have a serious problem with rebuilding, it’s that your civilization and constitution are gone. That’s the end of everything,” he added.
Woolsey cited a congressional report on the impact of an attack that would take out the nation’s electric grid for months. He said that up to 300 million Americans would die without the electricity needed to power everything from kitchens to gas pumps and water systems and hospitals.
He also pointed to the devastation following last year’s hurricane in Puerto Rico. “What we’re talking about is a much, much more devastating thing for American society that what happened to Puerto Rico…that was small compared to what an EMP takedown of the grid would be,” said Woolsey.
He credited Kwast for encouraging discussion on the issue and creating a trust between the Pentagon, government agencies and businesses.
“It is a difficult thing to get people to pay attention, particularly Americans, in a time of prosperity and success, to something like this,” said Woolsey.
“Your house’s electricity, if it goes down, it doesn’t care whether it happened because of some solar event or because of something done by the Iranians, it doesn’t care at all. It still is not going to cook your breakfast. People get hung up on the threat issues. And the great thing that Gen. Kwast has done is open this up to the civilian side as well as the military side and not just ask people to talk about issues related to traditional threat analysis, but to the overall problem for the world of dealing with different types, from hurricanes, to solar storms, to planned terrorist attacks with a stolen small nuclear weapon in a weather balloon to a concerted effort by a major power to take us out,” he added.
