FRONT PAGE: "Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies," by Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, 8 April 2009.
As usual, the prime culprits are the Chinese and Russians. When you're trying to scare the hell out of Congress, always pick stock villains.
Homeland Security is gearing itself up for some budget push all right, and so we are treated to a series of "revelations" in which outside nefarious actors are revealed to be plotting against us in all manner of ways.
Naturally, these reports never mention how much we engage in the very same activity vis-à-vis such states. When we do it, we don't call it "hacking" or "spying," but "targeting." There is no confusion or hesitancy on our side with regard to the desired utility: pick any country that you can envision America going to war with and I guarantee you that we have detailed plans to drop electrical grids and all manner of network infrastructure in that country at the start of open hostilities--or earlier.
When we make such efforts, we're not being provocative, but prudent. I mean, do you want a military that would suddenly have to gin up these plans and capabilities at the last moment?
But of course, if weaker powers engage in such stuff, then it's naturally provocative in its devious asymmetry.
But again, where is the asymmetry? We plan to do exactly the same to them at exactly the same points. But since they're weaker militarily, and we're so high-tech, we rightly assume that our capabilities will be more degraded than theirs. Fair enough, but along those lines of logic, it's hard to expect countries like Russia and China not to try and cut down our military supremacy, creating as many mutually-assured-destruction-like scenarios as possible. That's how the weak always seek to dissuade the powerful.
So be amazed if you must. Be shocked! Shocked I tell you!
And if you must run these scenarios through your head, please screen out all the ancillary economic nonsense and view them through the purity of the realists' logic--war completely isolated from the real world.
Does any of this argument reduce our incentives for improving security in such networks? Hell no. We should increase their resiliency for all manner of reasons, especially with regard to attacks by non-state actors who want all manner of economic distress to result (and who are essentially safe from any damaging American counter-strike).
But spare me the revelations and the hypocrisy of this sort of fear mongering. The Chinese and the Russians don't do anything to our nets that we haven't done to theirs. Our real fear here is their ability to veto our military operations abroad. But guess what? China's two trillion in dollar reserves does that a lot better (again with the economic nonsense!)
Whatever myths we want to retain from the post-Cold War/pre-9/11 window, the one we can't hold onto is that we need a national security establishment that can exert instant dominance over any opponent in the world despite the collective resistance of the world's rising great powers. We simply cannot take on all comers at once--live with it.
The dream of primacy in the early 1990s was as short-lived and fantastic as was the one we briefly entertained after WWII. This is hardly some great loss in strategic security. It is sheer folly for us to believe that we could trigger this hyper-interdependency of modern globalization and yet--somehow--hold intact our military supremacy in all its facets. Iraq and Afghanistan show clearly that we can start wars on our own, but that we cannot finish them.
Being reminded of such things regarding potential high-end scenarios with great powers like Russia and China is hardly some revelation. It simply reflects our interdependent, networked world.
Again, live with it. And stop pretending that only our enemies plot such nefarious attacks.
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 3:18AM 
