May 15, 2018—Need Presidential Executive Order to Implement EMP Commission Recommendations!

Following the EMP Commission’s last meeting on June 8-9, 2017, global events have strengthened public awareness of the worldwide vulnerability of critical infrastructures to high altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP). But the Commission’s reports are just now beginning to come out. President Trump should assure a much more responsive effort than is currently planned by the Congress, which foolishly canceled the past commission after it served with distinction for 17 years. Congress mandated a lengthy hiatus and eventually a new commission.

Last Wednesday, I applauded the public release of three of the EMP Commission Reports, thanks to the initiative of its Chairman for 17 years, Dr. William R. Graham, who funded his own webpage for that purpose.

Click here for that brief accounting of Dr. Graham’s unusual initiative prompted by the lethargic Department of Defense (DoD) delays that were the hallmark of its alleged support throughout the third generation of the EMP Commission’s effort. The DoD delayed for a year initiating the Commission’s effort — leaving only six-months until the end of last June to complete its assigned 18-month effort. The Commission then successfully negotiated for a limited effort until the end of September to complete writing and submitting its reports for Department of Defense (DoD) security review.

But the DoD frustrated subsequent review of the Commission’s 10 unclassified reports for release to inform the public of the EMP threat. It took seven more months, until last week, for the DoD to release the first three of those 10 reports — and then the DoD threatened to delay another several weeks before posting those three reports for access by the public — setting the stage for congress to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 (NDAA 2019) without those inputs and including directives that threaten more of the same lethargy into the indefinite future.

Click here for Dr. Graham’s webpage with its links to those three reports and the Commission’s previous (2004 and 2008) reports. In particular, I urge you to click here and read at least the Commission’s Executive Report and its discussion of The EMP Threat; Barriers to Effective Protection from the EMP Threat; Late Time EMP Fields and Effects; Testing Selected EMP-Vulnerable Full-System Equipment to Failure; Intelligence Community Assessment of the EMP Threat; and Conclusions and Recommendations.

Note the above date on the Executive Report, indicating when the Commission’s work was completed. Nothing has since changed that substantively alters the Commission’s conclusions and recommendations that follow:

“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, major efforts were 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 then 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 new, radical U.S. adversaries, 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.

“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. The following six recommendations are offered to accomplish this goal.

Recommendation 1: The Commission recommends 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 2: The Commission strongly recommends that implementation of cybersecurity for the electric grid and other critical infrastructures include EMP protection.
Recommendation 3: 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 4: 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 5: The Commission recommends that the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy provide expedited threat-level, full-system testing of large power transformers in wide use within the bulk electric system and share key findings with the electric utility industry.
Recommendation 6: The Commission recommends the Director of National Intelligence circulate to all recipients of the 2014 JAEIC report the EMP Commission critique and direct a new assessment be prepared that supersedes the 2014 JAEIC EMP report.”

I concur with these recommendations except for Recommendation 3, because of past congressional misdirection that undermined the preceding EMP Commission’s efforts, especially through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018. It undermined the past EMP Commission’s efforts and promoted additional delays by guaranteeing a politically charged activity in providing a new EMP Commission under the NDAA 2019 that is now pending approval.

President Trump should preempt these plans for FY2019 that risk more of the same DoD lethargy, which is certainly not in the interest of the American people. Based on its previous lethargic stewardship, the DoD should not be trusted to lead integrated efforts of any future EMP Commission charged with protecting the American people from the existential EMP threat.

Moreover, no other Department should be trusted to lead such a future EMP Commission effort, based on the past record of irresponsible stewardship by the departments that have key responsibilities.

Though the DoD allegedly supports the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in protecting the U.S. homeland, it apparently has done little beyond commanding our homeland ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems and supporting the National Guard — even though the DoD and our military forces depend critically on the nation’s civil infrastructure. The DHS response to congressional initiatives encouraging it to engage more constructively to protect the American people also has been less than notable. Then there’s the Department of Energy (DOE) which has failed to demonstrate notable leadership qualities in areas where it has long had important responsibilities.

The DOE aspires for a greater leadership role, but its past record does not justify any confidence in its competence to provide sound leadership. Its poor performance includes notable failures in overseeing appropriate regulatory constraints, in assuring sound intelligence assessments associated with potential threat nuclear weapons and in aiding the energy private sector in understanding nuclear weapon effects — specifically as it seeks to relearn EMP lessons that were mastered by the DoD a half century ago.

Click here for my November 14, 2017 message a little over a month after the final efforts of the past EMP Commission. It recounted many of these issues that reinforce my view that the DoD should not be trusted to lead future EMP Commission efforts that aspire to “whole of government” solutions to the existential EMP threat.

I included in that message a key excerpt from Dr. Graham’s April 20, 2017 letter (just over a year ago) to Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry, which includes comments consistent with those found three months later in the July 2017 EMP Commission Executive Report referenced above:

Nuclear EMP is the ultimate cyber weapon in the military doctrines and plans of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran for Combined Arms Cyber Warfare that they see as a decisive new Revolution in Military Affairs.
Protecting the grid from the worst threat — nuclear EMP attack — can also mitigate lesser threats, including from natural EMP from solar storms, non-nuclear EMP from radiofrequency weapons, cyber-attacks, physical sabotage and severe weather.
State electric grids can be “islanded” by installation of surge arrestors, blocking devices, Faraday cages, and other devices to protect individual states, even though they may be part of a larger regional electric grid, from a prolonged catastrophic blackout. For example, Texas State Senator Bob Hall has introduced legislation to harden the Texas Electric Grid.
The EMP Commission is profoundly concerned that the 2014 Obama administration intelligence community assessment of nuclear EMP is profoundly erroneous, and perhaps the worst ever produced on EMP, and that has been used to thwart efforts to protect the nation against nuclear EMP by dismissing the threat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Commissioners also are very concerned over misleading and erroneous studies by the NERC and others that grossly underestimate the natural EMP threat from solar storms, and dangerously, have become the basis for grossly inadequate standards for EMP/GMD protection approved by the Obama administration’s FERC.
Commissioners are also concerned over misleading and erroneous studies recently completed by industry’s Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in cooperation with Obama administration holdovers in the Department of Energy, that grossly underestimate the nuclear EMP threat.

Dr. Graham received no response from Secretary Perry or his staff, even as Congress imposed a break in the service of the only competent independent voices critically reviewing the obvious discordant management of our vital critical infrastructure. Dr. Graham also wrote letters to other key leaders, including the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security and the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He received no response from them or their staff’s either.

None of these leaders or their staffs took time even to discuss and seek to understand the views of the technically expert congressionally appointed commission that served with distinction for 17 years to identity the EMP threat and how to defend against it.

The unmistakable lesson is that President Trump cannot rely on them to accomplish what needs to be done to protect the American people against the existential EMP threat, especially without informed and technically competent leadership and direction from the White House.

Click here for a September 19, 2017 article in The Hill by Former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), unsuccessfully seeking to reverse the actions by the House Armed Services Committee on which he once served as Vice Chairman. As one of the two original main sponsors for founding the EMP Commission (the other was Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)), he wrote:

“Only Washington bureaucrats could be so stupid they would terminate the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, also known as the Congressional EMP Commission — just when North Korea threatened to attack the United States with EMP.”

The above brief recap of the current status of the federal government failures suggests immediate White House action is needed to rectify these shortcomings and to avoid the most unhelpful discontinuity of expert advice assured by NDAA 2018 and continued lethargy threatened by NDAA 2019 now being finalized in congress.

The NDAA 2018 called for starting over with a clean sheet of paper and an entirely new EMP Commission, assuring a hiatus of many more months. (It’s already been over 9-months since the last in-person meeting of the commission that in effect actually served for 18 years.) And based on past performance, it is doubtful that without White House leadership a new commission will be heard by the current federal bureaucracy any better than the past one has been,

It was a terrible time to lose the most experienced independent voices in advising the federal government on these matters and what should be done. And now the NDAA 2019 kicks the can for another year and does not promise any better response from the same bureaucracy headed by President Trump’s appointees.

Bottom Line!

Frankly, we urgently need an office in the White House with the authority and resources to integrate the disparate efforts of the federal government, along with developing a clearly articulated plan for a future whole of government program to deal with the threats to the electric power grid.

President Trump should establish 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. That individual 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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