Huge swaths of infrastructure aren’t adequately protected against such an attack, specialists warned, despite widespread agreement on the importance of the problem and the existence of technology to solve it.
But many specific steps have yet to be implemented, such as bringing all pieces of the electric grid up to the military’s “hardening” standard so they are able to withstand a major electromagnetic pulse.Pry said, citing federal bureaucracy and other factors that make the issue especially complex and difficult.
Indeed, other specialists said that the Biden administration should keep the nation’s EMP vulnerability firmly in mind as it doles out billions of dollars in infrastructure money.The good news is those technologies are out there, they exist,” said David Winks, managing director at AcquSight, a leading cyber, physical and electromagnetic resilience firm.
Last August, for example, the South China Morning Post and other regional media outlets reported that China very likely conducted its first test of an EMP weapon, successfully using the pulse to knock drones out of the sky.
China‘s electronic warfare strategy “emphasizes suppressing, degrading, disrupting, or deceiving enemy electronic equipment throughout the continuum of a conflict while protecting its ability to use the cyber and electromagnetic spectrum,” reads a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military capabilities.North Korea doesn’t need to have a very good ballistic missile in order to precisely deploy and detonate the weapon,” said Plamen Doynov, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and chief technology officer at the company EMP Shield.
… Or is he going to use the residual capabilities that we have, especially the military capabilities, to try to recover those critical civilian infrastructures because the clock is ticking toward the deaths of millions of Americans?”