Facing the Vulnerability of the Grid in the US and Australia
The modern city is an extraordinary machine whose inhabitants seldom notice the machine until it stops. Turn off the electricity for a few minutes and people complain about the inconvenience. Turn it off for a day and supermarkets, petrol stations, communications networks, traffic systems and businesses begin to struggle. Turn it off across a large region for weeks and the problem is no longer inconvenience. Electricity is the foundation beneath virtually every other piece of critical infrastructure upon which technological civilisation depends.
That uncomfortable reality gives particular significance to President Donald Trump's Executive Order of August 26, 2026, declaring a national emergency concerning the security of the American bulk-power system. The immediate subject of the order is not an electromagnetic pulse attack. Trump is targeting something more mundane but potentially just as important: dependence upon foreign-manufactured transformers, control systems, inverters, software, firmware and other equipment that could contain vulnerabilities exploitable by hostile states. The order warns explicitly about sabotage, unauthorised access, malicious remote action and supply disruption. It also authorises the identification, isolation and potentially replacement of equipment judged to present an unacceptable national-security risk.
That is a remarkable admission. The electrical grid is so fundamental to national survival that insecure components within it have become grounds for declaring a national emergency. Yet foreign equipment is only one part of the problem. The larger question raised by the order, and by warnings such as those discussed in the accompanying video (link below), is what would happen if an enemy decided that destroying electricity was a more effective means of waging war than destroying armies.
Modern warfare has made this question unavoidable. The traditional image of strategic attack is a missile striking an airbase, naval facility, weapons factory or command centre. But a technologically advanced society presents an adversary with a different target. Destroy the electrical infrastructure supporting those facilities and much of the damage can be accomplished indirectly. Civilian society is hit at the same time. Communications fail, pumps stop, refrigeration disappears, electronic payments become unreliable, water and sewerage systems encounter problems, industrial production falls and hospitals are forced onto emergency generation whose fuel supplies are finite. The grid is therefore not simply another piece of infrastructure. It is infrastructure for the infrastructure.
The United States Department of Energy has been studying one particularly disturbing version of this problem for years: electromagnetic pulse. A nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude can produce an EMP capable of inducing damaging electrical currents over a very large geographical area. The precise consequences depend upon the weapon, altitude, location, grid configuration and protective measures, and some popular accounts exaggerate EMP by imagining that every electronic device would instantly be destroyed. That is not necessary for EMP to constitute a serious strategic threat. The Department of Energy itself acknowledges that a high-altitude nuclear EMP has the potential to destabilise the power grid and damage critical equipment including large power transformers.
Those transformers are the Achilles heel in the story. They are not simply appliances that can be pulled off a warehouse shelf after the emergency has passed. Large power transformers can be enormous, highly specialised machines that must be manufactured for particular applications and transported with considerable difficulty. The US Department of Energy has reported manufacturing lead times stretching beyond 36 months in recent conditions, while more recent departmental material notes that some large transformer lead times have reached three to four years. A single large-transformer failure can disrupt electricity supply to hundreds of thousands of homes.
This changes the meaning of a successful attack. A bombed office can be rebuilt. A severed transmission line can usually be repaired. But widespread simultaneous destruction of difficult-to-replace transformers creates a restoration problem unlike an ordinary blackout. Replacement equipment has to exist, manufacturers must have operating factories, ports and transport must function, roads and railways must remain available, specialised crews must reach the damaged substations, and the electricity needed to support all this activity must itself somehow be restored.
There is a vicious circularity here. A modern economy needs electricity to manufacture and transport the equipment required to restore electricity. An enemy would not necessarily need EMP to exploit that weakness. Cyberattack offers another route. So does sabotage of substations, communications networks and control systems. Supply-chain compromise potentially provides an attacker with access before a war even begins. Trump's new executive order concentrates heavily upon precisely this possibility, warning that foreign-produced equipment could contain digital backdoors allowing remote access. The administration is consequently treating the provenance of transformers, control systems, battery systems, inverters and associated software as a national-security matter.
The strategic concept is simple enough. Instead of attempting to defeat every component of the American military, attack the technological ecosystem in which the military and the civilian economy operate. The same logic applies to any highly electrified Western nation.
Australia deserves particular attention because Australians have become extraordinarily dependent upon interconnected technological systems while living on a continent with long supply chains, dispersed infrastructure and limited domestic manufacturing capacity for many specialised industrial products. The National Electricity Market links the eastern and southern states through an enormous interconnected system. That interconnection normally provides efficiency and resilience, but complex interconnected systems also require careful management when disturbances begin cascading through them.
Australia already has experience of what a genuine black-system event looks like. South Australia suffered a state-wide blackout in September 2016. That event was not caused by enemy action or EMP, and it should not be misrepresented as evidence that an EMP catastrophe is imminent. Its importance is more basic: it demonstrated that large sections of a modern Australian electricity system really can go dark and that restarting them is a specialised engineering operation rather than simply throwing a master switch.
AEMO consequently maintains system-restart arrangements for precisely such circumstances. Its recent technical work explicitly considers extreme disturbances capable of causing cascading trips, islanding and ultimately complete system shutdown. AEMO has also been examining the complications involved in restarting a future grid containing large quantities of distributed solar and inverter-based resources. In other words, Australia does plan for black-system events. The question is whether planning for conventional system failures is enough in an era in which critical infrastructure itself may become a deliberate military target.
An EMP attack would represent an extreme case because it potentially combines geographical scale with simultaneous effects. Cyberwarfare presents a different problem because an attacker might penetrate systems quietly before activating access during a crisis. Physical sabotage is cruder but potentially effective against carefully selected nodes. A coordinated attack could conceivably combine methods: cyber operations against control and communications systems, physical attacks against difficult-to-replace equipment and conventional military strikes against generating or transmission facilities. This is why grid resilience should no longer be treated merely as an energy-policy question. It is defence policy.
For Australia, that means asking uncomfortable questions. How many critical transformers could be replaced rapidly if several were lost together? Where are the spares? How much of the equipment is imported? How quickly could overseas replacements arrive during a major Indo-Pacific war in which shipping itself might be disrupted? Which power stations possess genuine black-start capability? How long can hospitals, water systems, telecommunications facilities and fuel depots function independently? Are critical control systems genuinely isolated from hostile remote access? How much essential equipment is dependent upon foreign software, firmware and maintenance arrangements?
None of this requires believing the most extravagant "grid down" scenarios on the internet. Indeed, exaggeration is counterproductive. An EMP does not have to fry every mobile phone, stop every vehicle and return an entire continent instantly to the nineteenth century to constitute a strategic catastrophe. An attacker only has to damage enough critical nodes to make restoration slow and difficult while simultaneously disrupting the communications, transport and industrial systems required for recovery.
The consequences would then propagate through systems that were never directly attacked. Electricity failure affects telecommunications. Telecommunications failure complicates electricity restoration. Fuel distribution requires electricity and communications. Repair vehicles require fuel. Water treatment and pumping require electricity. Hospitals require all of them. Supermarkets depend upon refrigeration, electronic logistics, payment networks and continuous deliveries. Agriculture may occur far from the cities, but processing, refrigeration, transport and distribution remain heavily mechanised and electrically dependent.
The lesson is not that civilisation inevitably collapses the moment the lights go out. Modern grids contain protection systems, utilities maintain emergency procedures, governments plan for disasters and black-start resources exist precisely because engineers understand that complete or partial shutdowns can occur. The lesson is that resilience has limits, particularly when failures cease to be accidental and an intelligent adversary deliberately attacks the points most difficult to replace.
Trump's August order should therefore be read as part of a much larger strategic awakening. The United States has recognised that the origin of transformers, control systems and their software is a national-security issue because a hostile state should not be given hidden leverage over the machinery that keeps the country alive. The next step is to extend the same reasoning from supply-chain security to physical resilience, transformer reserves, domestic manufacturing, EMP protection, cyber defence and rapid system restoration. Australia should be asking the same questions before a crisis supplies the answers.
For decades Western defence planning concentrated on protecting military platforms: submarines, fighters, missiles, bases and communications. Those things remain essential. But the distinction between civilian infrastructure and military capability is becoming increasingly artificial. A fifth-generation fighter is not much use if the industrial and logistical network sustaining it has stopped functioning. Nor is a sophisticated digital economy impressive when the electricity beneath it disappears.
The paradox of technological civilisation is that increasing sophistication can increase both capability and dependency. We have built societies capable of achievements previous generations could scarcely imagine, but we have also connected food, water, medicine, banking, communications, transport, government and defence to a common electrical nervous system. That nervous system deserves to be defended accordingly.
The real warning behind the grid-down scenario is therefore not that tomorrow morning an EMP will suddenly extinguish civilisation. Predictions of that kind move from risk analysis into prophecy. The warning is more sober and consequently more serious. In a major war, an adversary will search for the cheapest way of inflicting the greatest systemic damage. America and Australia have concentrated enormous portions of their economic and social functioning upon electricity networks containing critical components that can take months or even years to replace.
Trump has now formally declared part of that vulnerability a national emergency. Australia would be foolish to wait for a war before deciding that its own electrical grid is also a national-security asset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHcLL0MlqeM
