June 19, 2018—EMP Commission Reports Continue to Dribble Out . . .

“Protecting and defending the national electric grid and other critical infrastructures from cyber and EMP could be accomplished at reasonable cost and minimal disruption to the present systems that comprise U.S. critical infrastructure. This is commensurate with Trump Administration plans to repair and improve U.S. infrastructures, increase their reliability, and strengthen homeland defense and military capability. Continued failure to address the U.S. vulnerability to EMP generated by a high-altitude nuclear weapon invites such an attack.” ~Recently released July 2017 EMP Commission Executive Report.”

My May 9, 2018 message reported on how the Defense Department’s lethargic classification review process was stalling the clearance of the reports of the congressionally appointed Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack — for short the EMP Commission. The above quotation is from a July 2017 report, which was at long last cleared for public release about three weeks ago.

Click here for my May 9th message illustrating how the federal bureaucracy has been preventing the private energy sector from obtaining needed information for protecting the electric power grid against the existential threat posed by natural and manmade EMP — and that, given the manifestation of that lethargy in getting the government to publish those reports, the EMP Commission Chairman Dr. William R. Graham paid for a separate webpage to publish them: http://www.firstempcommission.org/.

This week, three more reports were released and added to Dr. Graham’s webpage; click here for one of these pertinent reports illustrated below. Note its date, also almost a year ago. Not sure when additional reports will be dribbled out.

As further evidence of this lethargy, I note that Dr. Graham, many months ago wrote to the Secretaries of Defense, Energy and Homeland Security and received no response from any of them. Apparently, they and their staffs were — and are — not worried about this truly existential threat to the American people and therefore are complicit in sweeping important facts under the rug.

For example, Click here for Dr. Graham’s August 20, 2017 letter to Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, which among other things spelled out several matters that should have been — and are — of importance to the Energy Department.

Unfortunately, as made clear in the Commission’s Executive Summary Final Report, they were not addressed. Click here for that important Commission report, the Summary of which follows (Emphasis added.):

The critical national infrastructure in the United States faces a present and continuing existential threat from combined-arms warfare, including cyber and manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, as well as from natural EMP from a solar superstorm. During the Cold War, the U.S. was primarily concerned about an EMP attack generated by a high-altitude nuclear weapon as a tactic by which the Soviet Union could suppress the U.S. national command authority and the ability to respond to a nuclear attack—and thus negate the deterrence value of assured nuclear retaliation. Within the last decade, newly-armed adversaries, including North Korea, have been developing the ability and threatening to carry out an EMP attack against the United States. Such an attack would give countries that have only a small number of nuclear weapons the ability to cause widespread, long-lasting damage to critical national infrastructures, to the United States itself as a viable country, and to the survival of a majority of its population.

Major efforts have been undertaken by the Department of Defense to assure that the U.S. national command authority and U.S. strategic forces could survive and operate after an EMP attack. However, no major efforts were thought necessary to protect critical national infrastructures, relying on nuclear deterrence to protect them. With the development of small nuclear arsenals and long-range missiles by small, hostile, and potentially irrational adversaries, including North Korea, the threat of a nuclear EMP attack against the U.S. becomes one of the few ways that such a country could inflict devastating damage to the United States.

It is critical, therefore, that the U.S. national leadership address the EMP threat as a critical and existential issue, and give a high priority to assuring the leadership is engaged and the necessary steps are taken to protect the country from EMP. Otherwise, foreign adversaries may reasonably consider such an attack as one which can gravely damage the U.S. by striking at its technological Achilles’ heel without having to engage the U.S. military.

Protecting and defending the national electric grid and other critical infrastructures from cyber and EMP could be accomplished at reasonable cost and minimal disruption to the present systems that comprise U.S. critical infrastructure. This is commensurate with Trump Administration plans to repair and improve U.S. infrastructures, increase their reliability, and strengthen homeland defense and military capability. Continued failure to address the U.S. vulnerability to EMP generated by a high-altitude nuclear weapon invites such an attack.

The single most important action that requires immediate action to advance U.S. security and survivability is that the President establish an Executive Agent with the authority, accountability, and resources to manage U.S. national infrastructure protection and defense against the existential EMP threat (Recommendation 1). Current institutional authorities and responsibilities — government, industry, regulatory agencies — are fragmented, incomplete, under-resourced, and unable to protect and defend against foreign hostile EMP threats or solar superstorms.

The Commission highly commends President Trump’s Executive Order 13800, Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure, signed on May 11, 2017. The Commission strongly recommends that implementation of cybersecurity for the electric grid and other critical infrastructures include EMP protection (Recommendation 2), because all-out cyber warfare may well include nuclear EMP attack.

Protecting against nuclear EMP will also protect against natural EMP from solar storms, although the converse is not true. The United States must take steps to mitigate its current state of vulnerability to these well-known natural and adversary EMP threats. To further this endeavor, the Commission encourages the President to work with Congressional leaders to establish a joint Presidential-Congressional Commission, with its members charged with supporting the Nation’s leadership to achieve, on an accelerated basis, the protection of critical national infrastructures. (Recommendation 3).

Across the U.S. government, the DoD and its supporting laboratories and contractors have by far the most knowledge, data, and experience related to the production of and survival from nuclear weapon-generated EMP. However, the DoD has largely failed to make this knowledge available to other government agencies and to the organizations that develop, build, and operate U.S. critical national infrastructure. For example, there has been a continuing unwillingness of the DoD to provide specific information about the EMP environment to the commercial community owing to classification restrictions. Today the DHS looks to the DOE to provide guidance and direction for protecting the national electric power grids. Such a course of action would take longer and cost more compared to establishing a program of cooperation with the knowledgeable parts of the DoD.

In the absence of an unclassified, well-informed U.S. late-time (E3) EMP threat specification [described in Appendix B], electric utilities, electrical equipment manufacturers, and electric research institutes have articulated their inability to design appropriate countermeasures and to justify cost recovery for capital investments programs. Accordingly, this Commission has prioritized the development of late-time E3 threat specifications, derived from openly available test data. As part of this assessment, Commission staff analyzed E3 EMP measurements from two nuclear high-altitude tests performed by the Soviet Union in 1962. Physicists with extensive experience in EMP modeling used these data waveforms and an understanding of the scaling relationships for the nuclear explosion-induced upper atmospheric heave phenomenon that produces the E3 EMP electromagnetic fields by disturbing the natural magnetic field of the Earth. Based on this analysis, the Commission recommends that government agencies and industries adopt new standards to protect critical national infrastructures from damaging E3 EMP heave fields, with more realistic standards of 85 V/km (Recommendation 4).

Typical waveforms for commercial applications are included in Appendix B that should prove useful for the protection of the national power grids. The Commission also recommends electric grid equipment with long-replacement times such as large power transformers be tested to system failure (Recommendation 5). In the area of national intelligence, the Commission found that the classified report by the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) on EMP issued in 2014 is factually erroneous and analytically unsound. The Commission recommends the Director of National Intelligence circulate to all recipients of the 2014 JAEIC report the EMP Commission critique of that report and direct a new assessment be prepared that supersedes the 2014 JAEIC EMP report (Recommendation 6). The new report should be reviewed by experts in the subject areas being addressed and circulated to all the recipients of the 2014 assessment.

Click here for my May 22 message — entitled “What, Me Worry?” — that emphasized that the “powers that be” have long ignored this existential threat. To make the point that this is not a recent failure, note that the recently published Commission Final Report Executive Summary provides the following observations regarding its 2008 report recommendations — a decade ago.

In a 2011 study, the DoD’s JASON advisory panel concluded that the federal response to the EMP risk “is poorly organized; no one is in charge, resulting in duplications and omissions between agencies.” A survey of recent government reports that address the protection of critical infrastructure reveals that none mention EMP, although critical infrastructure risks, resilience, protection, and availability are central to each report and to each Departments’ mission.

During a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs (SHSGA) Committee on July 22, 2015, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) acknowledged that none of the recommendations of the EMP Commission to protect the national grid from EMP have been implemented by DHS, DOE, U.S. FERC or the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). The GAO report explained lack of progress in protecting the national electric grid from EMP as due to a lack of leadership, because no one was in charge of solving the EMP problem, as follows: “DHS and DOE, in conjunction with industry, have not established a coordinated approach to identifying and implementing key risk management activities to address EMP risks.”

In March 2016, GAO reported that none of the essential measures recommended by the EMP Commission to protect the national electric grid had been addressed by Federal agencies, as shown in Table 1. The report stated that agencies had primarily drafted industry standards and federal guidelines and have only completed related research reports rather than implementing the resulting recommendations.

Thus, as stated in my May 22^nd message, I do not agree with EMP Commission’s Recommendation 3 for a “Joint Presidential-Congressional Commission,” because of past Congressional and Executive Branch lethargy and misdirection that undermined the past EMP Commission’s efforts, especially through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 that guaranteed additional delays via a politically charged activity to select a new EMP Commission.

Instead, I strongly urge that President Trump preempt these plans for a “new EMP Commission” that risks more of the same federal government lethargy, which is certainly not in the interest of the American people. Moreover, there is an approach that would be consistent with the EMP Commission’s Recommendation 1: An Executive Agent with the authority, accountability, and resources to manage U.S. national infrastructure protection and defense against the existential EMP threat.

Frankly, I believe the only way out of the current “EMP threat swamp” is to have a qualified leader in an office in the White House with the authority and resources dedicated solely to integrating the disparate efforts of the federal government to develop and execute a clearly articulated plan for a whole of government program to deal with the threats to the electric power grid.

Bottom Line.

President Trump should establish as soon as possible such a response by Executive Order, led by a full-time technically competent individual, reporting to the President through the National Security Advisor, to provide a “whole of government” integrated plan to protect the American people against the existential EMP threat. They should establish a role for any of the past EMP Commissioners who wish to continue to serve, to assure continuity with the past 17-year efforts.

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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