The US grid is a ferociously complicated system, by some estimates the largest machine in the world. There are roughly 3,300 electric companies that provide power to individual citizens and commercial users of power in the United States.
But the Army amps up the potential threat of taking down grids anyway. Drawing from an article in Defense News, the Report posits:
The first challenge is external, as the bases rely on the towns and cities around them to provide power and other resources. Those utilities are often more vulnerable to a cyberattack or terrorism than military installations; shutting down the local power grid that supplies energy to Fort McNair could be as effective as targeting the base itself.
How so are they more vulnerable, as grids are off-net, unless you're daft.
No, grids are virtually impossible to take down by cyber access, if offline, and require unlikely direct terrorist action to succeed. And then, only at a local level. As we have seen time and time again, in Hollywood films, the LA grid can potentially be molested by terrorists or gooves, but not permanently. And least not in Hollywood, you know, where lit bulbs are the bread and butter of their culture -- bulbs and ganja. There have been scary tales of SCADA hacks that gained access to the infrastructure of gas, electric and water companies, but, again, it's because some knucklehead, for the sake of convenience, decided to put critical infrastructure online. Why the risk?
But Ashley Dawson reckons that this kind of relatively small-scale thinking about the problem might be the Problem. Again, in People's Power,
Terms like "global warming" and "climate change" are far too anesthetic to characterize the crisis of our times: We are living through a planetary environmental cataclysm that is on track to exterminate most life on Earth.
But still we f*ck around over definitions and threat levels. Calling grids vulnerable has the feel of preparation for needing soldiers to take over the grids eventually -- for national security reasons.
And, here again, in the area of infrastructure, the Milley Report, either out of desperation or just a bizarre mindset, comes up with "solutions" that seem unlikely to work in principle, and, even if they do, to be unscalable to the crisis at hand. For instance, the Report mentions deploying micro-grids and micro nuclear devices to generate power. Essentially, nukes on the back of a truck that would be available either for military base usage only, or for emergency deployment should local grids that a base relies on be sabotaged. This is icky. Such nukes, though technically being referred to, in the Report, as "renewable," have the same drawbacks that large-scale nukes have. Waste. Terrorism. A BBC piece, "The countries building miniature nuclear reactors," explains the technology in-depth and makes clear that it's just another hash pipe dream. Also, eligible for an Iggy.
But any pretense that the Army (and by extension the DoD's other services) has about reigning its excessive environmental impact goes up in smoke when the Report turns to discussing what to do about the Arctic meltdown and its certain "cataclysmic" consequences for the world. Oh, my God, what have we done? No, that's not the reaction. Where will the nice Frankenstein monster live now? Nah, that's not it. Mustn't we end our fossil-fueling ways right now? Today? This very instant? Isn't that the lesson of history we must acknowledge and learn from? Nuh-uh, nope, not really, no way, Jose. We choose not to cut the thit.
In fact, the Milley Report sees the Arctic meltdown as a huge breakthrough opportunity. Sea lanes will open up: "As the sea ice in the Arctic continues to decrease, there are greater opportunities for all nations to take advantage of new shipping routes between ports in Asia and those in Europe or Eastern North America." No more icebergs, no more Titanic misadventures. "Furthermore," and definitely far more important, the Report goes on, "according to a 2008 U.S. Geological survey, the Arctic likely holds approximately one quarter of the world's undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves...20% of those undiscovered reserves are potentially in U.S. territory." NYUH-UH-UH. And this meltdown will expose us to "Russia's global pattern of aggression and attempts to reestablish great power status [that] may set conditions for another flashpoint in the Arctic." In other words, Ice Station Zebra II. We need to get there pronto, the Reports contends, because
Russia's current Arctic plans include the opening of ten search and rescue stations, 16 deep water ports, 13 airfields and ten air defense sites. These developments create not only security outposts for Russia, but also threats to the U.S. mainland.
So, As The World Ends, the longest soap opera in history, continues. Oil, Boil, Toil.
And, even here, if Milley Vanilli had just removed The Appendix, Reason and Cogency might have prevailed. But the lip-service to climate accountability goes way out of sync here. Suddenly, out of no fuckin where we're talking cloudseeding wars with the Russkies. How we're already gain-of-functioning the clouds. The Report reveals for the first time (to me, anyway) that "we" are currently in a cloud-f*cking war with hostiles . "The concept of weaponizing the natural environment is nothing new." Okay, but then they add,
United States' cloudseeding techniques used aircraft to disperse lead iodide into the atmosphere above portions of Southeast Asia to create a super-saturated environment during the Vietnamese monsoon season. The increased precipitation produced significant degradation of Vietnamese logistic capabilities as vehicles, carts, and men remained bogged down on certain roadways and paths soaked by nearly continuous rainfall. [page 48]
Not even a dega pair of galoshes amongst the lot? Crazy chapter that makes you wonder if General Milley was really afraid of a coup on Jan 6 or just lip-synching righteousness he didn't believe.
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