September 4, 2018—Work from the Bottom Up!

“What I decided to do when I set out to write this book was to try to understand why the core values — the core qualities that make America great seemed to be in decline . . . whether it is the ability for Washington to get anything done, the kind of bipartisanship we used to enjoy on big issues . . . what I found was in many ways our core values have been hijacked . . .” Steven Brill, Author of Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It

While I often don’t agree with Fareed Zakaria and his guests on CNN’s Global Public Square (GPS), I almost always enjoy the discussion they provoke. Sunday was exceptionally so, especially his discussion with the authors of the two books illustrated above. I have not read the books but plan to buy and read them, based on this informative interview, especially given my own views on the fact that the Federal government, both Executive and Legislative Branches, are badly broken.

Click here for this full GPS show; and consider especially the 15 minute interview with the authors of these two books, beginning at 5:44 minutes-in. I was not familiar with Steven Brill, but James Fallows is a familiar name from several books he wrote years ago on National Security matters. And his wife certainly appears to have fully joined in their joint effort based on their 100,000 mile travels around our Nation over the past several years.

The GPS interview suggests there is hope for a return to the responsible order of yesteryear, from the bottom-up in spite of Washington’s all too often failures. As I have often written in my High Frontier messages and other articles, I believe we actually must work from the bottom-up in our local counties and states to assure that our electric power grid is viable in the face of existing and growing existential threats.

As I testified to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on May 4, 2017, I believe we can and must do this, especially in the face of the dysfunctional federal establishment’s dealing with the existential natural and manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threats. Click here and here for my May 9 and 16 discussion of that hearing, including links to the entire hearing (in which I was joined by former Speaker Newt Gingrich who also is very concerned about the EMP threat).

My May 16, 2017 message dwelt on the threat from North Korea, which has not gone away as recent reports have emphasized and as the Trump administration seeks to continue talks to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

This is a worthy goal, but North Korea already has 40 or so nuclear weapons (according to the intelligence community). They could be carried by their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), as a demonstrated capability, to deliver an EMP attack on the United States, by simply detonating those nuclear weapons above the atmosphere and over the United States. Kim Jong Un claimed this capability was a strategic goal well over a year ago, and this threat exists today!

Click here for my more recent (April 20, 2018) invited article for the American Legion based on my May 4, 2017 testimony. It was then shared with 1-2 million members of the American Legion around the world — and is linked to on High Frontier’s webpage near the top of its right hand column for easy future reference. I am gratified that others have requested from the American Legion the rights to further publish it.

As reported — especially in my May 9, 2017 High Frontier message, we are working with Duke Energy engineers to conduct a pilot study around Lake Wylie (on the Catawba River flowing from North Carolina to South Carolina) in York County to understand the factors that must be accommodated to protect our citizens from truly existential threats posed by our enemies — and even by a natural event that surely will one day occur when a massive Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun intersects the Earth’s orbit coincident with our passage. We barely missed (by about a week) such an occurrence in 2012. And we have no time to waste.

Our Lake Wylie Pilot Study has been making considerable progress, and we should soon have key results to share with others around the nation on how they might also exploit the lessons we have learned. See below the figure from my May 9, 2017 High Frontier message, which also has appeared in many of my briefings around the nation. Hopefully it will become a pattern that others around the nation can and will follow.

Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned is that the citizens of York County do not get their electricity from Duke Energy, they receive it via critical infrastructure of either Rock Hill Utility company or a York County Cooperative (CoOp).

Therefor, it follows that assuring the viability of the 1000-2000 utility companies and CoOps across the nation’s complex electric power grid is vital to the well-being of many if not most of our citizens.

Moreover, the water-wastewater sector which is vital for the survival of our citizenry is particularly important — in my view it is among the most important of our critical civil infrastructures, second only to the electric grid itself. And its viability depends on electricity. Without water, hospital patients can be expected to begin dying within hours.

The leaders of Rock Hill, I think the fourth largest city in South Carolina and home of York County’s hospital, have been very cooperative with our pilot study and in engaging Duke Energy to assure their critically important substations and associated infrastructure are integrated to assure the hospital remains viable in case of a major grid blackout.

I am confident that Duke Energy will do all it can to assure its critical infrastructure (including its Nuclear, Hydroelectric and Coal electric power plants on Lake Wylie as well as its associated grid infrastructure) is viable, but that does not take care of the Rock Hill Hospital and most if not all the citizens of York County, including employees of Duke Energy. Thus, protecting the Rock Hill Utility and York County CoOps is essential.

The second important lesson I have learned is that the Federal government, especially the Department of Defense, has been irresponsible in not making available to the energy sector the lessons learned a half century ago in hardening against EMP threats to our strategic systems and their associated command, control and communications systems.

This irresponsible behavior has delayed making key information available that long ago should have been declassified — on matters no doubt well known to our enemies who may use an EMP attack against our electric power grid — as Kim Jong Un explicitly said last year was his strategic goal.

As an example of this irresponsible behavior, consider that it has taken over a year for the DoD to clear through its security review bureaucracy the reports of the EMP Commission, which congress stupidly disbanded last year after 17 years of exemplary, mostly pro bono, service. Moreover, even when its reports were finally cleared, the DoD refused to make them available via its official publications. Thus, the EMP Commission Chairman purchased his own webpage to make them available to the public.

Click here for Dr. William R. Graham’s important webpage — and note that in the future it also can be linked from High Frontier’s webpage by clicking onto the picture of one of the commission reports at the top of its right-hand column.

To further emphasize this DoD lethargy, click here for my December 5, 2017 message which, among other things, provided Dr. Graham’s charts used in his Dupont Summit briefing on the status of the dawdling DoD progress in getting his commission’s reports cleared. See below for an explicit chart from Dr. Graham’s briefing showing how DoD was then continuing to overclassify matters.

This 35 year old report by Gerry Schlegel, another colleague of Bill’s and mine from the Air Force Weapons Laboratory and R&D Associates (and an EMP expert), was published on 31 March 1983 and eventually declassified on September 12, 2017. However, most pertinent is “Distribution Statement C,” authorizing distribution to “U.S. Government Agencies and their contractors,” but requiring other requests to be “referred” to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which has been withholding that information from many who need it to protect the electric power grid.

Note the associated date, September 12, 2017, was slightly before final expiration of the EMP Commission that had requested this security review and sought to make this and other key information available to engineers responsible for maintaining our critical civil infrastructure. Dr. Graham suggested that private sector officials request copies via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). (It of course follows that one must know of the existence of such a report to make a specific FOIA request.)

Moreover, Bill identified a commission report that showed that “the powers that be” were seriously underestimating the low frequency EMP pulse, including that created by a major Coronal Mass Ejection. That report, including its use of Soviet/Russian EMP test data from their better instrumented tests in the 1960s, can at long last be obtained from Bill’s webpage.

Click here, but don’t be deceived by the July 2017 date referring to when this important report was written — it was only recently cleared. Also consider other Commission and staff reports that are finally available. In particular, click here for the Commission’s executive summary.

Clearly, the previous “powers that be” should not be trusted going forward. As I also recommended in my December 5, 2017 High Frontier message (among others and related published articles), the President should take matters into his own hands and manage from the White House the dysfunctional and previously irresponsible elements of the Federal government. A key problem is that no one is in charge — and that failing should be rectified as soon as possible.

Click here for the October 1997 Report of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, led by Retired USAF General Robert T. Marsh, that might serve as an appropriate model for supporting such an initiative today. EMP was a highly classified matter when the Marsh Commission served and so was not considered. But the cyber threat was, and it is much better addressed today — though there remain serious vulnerabilities as is well known. Time for a “redo” including EMP?

Finally — and not unrelated, click here for an important August 26, 2018 Washington Examiner article reporting that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has argued that we need a Space Force to prevent an “existential threat” to our electric power grid. Click here for my Newsmax article last Friday, referencing Bridenstine’s important article, and also arguing that the urgent need for a Space Force and our longstanding possibility for building cost-effective space based defenses certainly are not matters of “science fiction” as some profess.

Indeed, I explained that we have known how to build quite affordable space-based defenses for 30-years and should begin immediately to build such a system — I would add, while working the institutional issues to embed it in a Space Force. Congress already authorized such an initiative in the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 (NDAA-19) as discussed last week. We await the passage of, and the President’s signature on, the Department of Defense Appropriation Act for 2019 — before the end of this Fiscal Year, September 30, 2018 . . . Please?

In any case, we need also to be working quickly from the “bottom-up” to counter all the existential threats to our electric power grid rather than waiting on the formation of a Space Force as well and the needed space-based defenses to protect not only the grid, but all Americans at home and overseas, including our troops and friends and allies.

Bottom Lines.

Our citizens should not wait on Washington to get its act together in dealing with this urgently important existential threat to the electric power grid.

Each of us must inform ourselves on this existential threat and take initiatives at our local and state levels to protect all that we hold most dear. If we do this, perhaps “the powers that be” in Washington will eventually get the message to take supportive initiatives rather than further staling progress.

The most important Washington initiative would be for President Trump to establish and back a technically competent White House authority to knock heads together among the currently dysfunctional agents of the Executive Branch and frame a comprehensive response to this existential threat. — one that embodies, empowers and supports unfolding bottoms-up initiatives.

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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