The United States spends more money on military preparedness than any other country – nearly $2 billion per day. But some of the most obvious challenges get short shrift in the federal budget. A case in point is the inability of essential defense installations to function if the lights go out for more than a few days. Ten years ago, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board issued a study warning that “military installations are almost completely dependent on a fragile and vulnerable commercial power grid, placing critical military and homeland defense missions at unacceptable risk of extended outage.” The study went on to assert that “backup power at military installations is based on assumptions of a more resilient grid than exists and much shorter outages than may occur.”
Nothing has been done during the intervening decade to remedy these vulnerabilities. In fact, the danger has grown worse as overseas adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran increasingly probe the U.S. electric grid using cyber tools. With 99% of the electricity used at domestic military sites coming from “outside the fence ” – meaning off-base – the military is limited in its ability to prevent on-line disruption of power sources.
The hundreds of companies and local authorities that operate electric utilities have few incentives to harden their power lines and stations against cyber attack, or kinetic assaults, or the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear explosions. The 2008 report contained a secret annex detailing how newly-discovered cyber exploits against the civilian grid might have unique consequences for military preparedness. That threat continues to grow, but the response of local utilities is uneven at best.
You don’t need access to classified information to see how dependent our national security establishment is on power sources beyond its control. If you ever find yourself waiting for the traffic light to change at the intersection of Virginia Route 123 and Georgetown Pike in McLean, VA all you have to do is look up to see where the nearby CIA headquarters gets its electricity from. The lines are run onto CIA grounds from a commercial utility. The same is true at National Reconnaissance Office headquarters in Chantilly, VA, and National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, MD.
Security experts have long realized that the electric grid lacks resilience. It could easily be collapsed by a handful of trained operators who know where key lines and nodes are located. That is one reason why backup generators have been installed at many defense sites. But most of those generators only have fuel for a few days worth of operation, after which the ability of a site to continue functioning will depend on getting more diesel fuel. If you think that will be easy, check out how Puerto Rico has fared since the hurricane there. Memo to FEMA: fuel pumps don’t work without electricity.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is currently rethinking its assumptions about the potential duration of civilian power outages in the aftermath of the Puerto Rico catastrophe. America’s military should too. It doesn’t require any great leap of imagination to see how a major weather event or deliberate attack might shut down normal power supplies for weeks or months, and yet the defense posture of the world’s sole superpower, including the military chain of command, depends in large part on vulnerable power sources.
That really needs to change, or at least be supplemented by a system that can keep the lights on at places like Fort Meade. During the Reagan years, the military stood up an entire agency to assure continuity of government during a prolonged nuclear exchange – what was called the “transattack” phase of war. There were going to be command posts on eighteen-wheelers tooling up and down the interstate highway system, resilient communications links, and all sorts of other stuff. Today, a prolonged loss of power would collapse much of the defense system.
There are numerous potential solutions to this problem. Most of them would involve reversing an efficiency move made after the Cold War ended in which military bases and other defense installations ceased producing their own power. Creating “microgrids” within base borders that can operate independently of the commercial power system would seem to be the most obvious approach, although the actual sources of their on-base power would vary. For instance, solar might work better in the Southwest, hydro power in the Northeast.
I’m not proposing any particular solution, but it does seem sensible to try a few pilot projects at defense sites to see which initiatives offer the most sensible, affordable ways of reducing dependence on a fragile commercial power grid. The grid is evolving fast anyway, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the low priority assigned to building in resilience. Utility executives and other players hear the word “resilience,” and fear it will lead to costly mandates that impair their business models.
The military, on the other hand, is more concerned with readiness. It is also awash in money compared with other federal functions. So perhaps that is the best place to try out some novel ideas that would reduce the likelihood our national security apparatus will cease functioning if the grid goes down for a few months like it did in Puerto Rico. How much warning do we need to get the message that fixes are needed?
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