Fortifying America: Is the Pentagon Ready?

Soon, the Pentagon will release its National Security Strategy. It’s rumored to rank homeland security as priority one. Enforcing immigration controls, defending America against missile attacks, and countering narco-terrorist operations are sure to get mission plus-ups.

Last week, drones overflew major airports in Copenhagen and Oslo. A ransomware attack disrupted passenger security screening systems in Berlin, London, Brussels, and Dublin, shutting down operations throughout the weekend.

These assaults on Europe’s air transport system align with several years of suspicious train derailments and telecom and electrical supply system cable cuts in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Baltic Sea. Two major train derailments have occurred along the Malmbanan iron ore line which connects Norway, Sweden, and the Baltic Sea near Finland and Estonia – a prime target for Russian sabotage.  

Since 2022, ten subsea cables connecting Baltic Sea states, including several telecom cables and one power cable, have been cut, with seven cuts occurring between November 2024 and January 2025. China and Russia are the suspected perpetrators. Halfway around the world, Taiwan is suffering repeated telecom cable cuts as well. Beijing is suspect.

Then, there are cyber attacks that have locked up medical facilities’ electronic systems throughout Europe and Asia, paralyzing the helping hand of healthcare. A 2025 survey found that three quarters of the hospitals in the EU have been attacked in the last twelve months. Hospitals in Asia have been hit even harder.

The United States is next. As far back as 2021, America’s largest gasoline transport system – the Colonial Pipeline – shut down after a cyber attack with Russian fingerprints. Last winter, drones overflew several major nuclear power plants in New Jersey and Louisiana, as well as military bases, electrical generating and switching stations, bridges, ports, and airports.

Recently, there’s been confirmation of a long-term Chinese cyber warfare campaign – Volt Typhoon – to attack America’s electrical supply system. Other Chinese cyber campaigns have been probing to find vulnerabilities in America’s telecommunications systems.

So far, our government’s response to these probes has been cloaked in secrecy. Both Presidents Biden and Trump did their level best to downplay last winter’s drone overflights. The head of NORTHCOM at the time, responsible for defending against such attacks, had a different take: On 60 Minutes, he said he had no idea what these things were or where they were coming from. He was concerned. Congress is too. The House recently proposed legislation to authorize the Energy Department to disable or destroy drones overflying its nuclear plants (but not the 92 U.S. private commercial reactors). How this will be done remains unclear.

Much of the security planning for America’s critical civilian infrastructure is kept from the public eye with special classifications – e.g., controlled unclassified information (CUI), critical energy/electric infrastructure information (CEII), and sensitive but unclassified (SBU). This keeps Americans in the dark about their public utility systems’ vulnerabilities, what to expect of their government, and how to prepare for the worst.

What passive and active defenses should our government build to protect these public facilities and systems? How much should private industry be required to provide? Should critical civilian subsystems be proliferated to make them more difficult to knock out? Should our electrical supply systems operate on smaller grids if larger ones black out? What of Golden Dome? Should it protect these systems against aerial assaults? To what extent?

Unfortunately, Congress and the Executive can’t answer these questions. The number of committees and executive offices covering homeland security, energy transport systems, telecommunications, airport security, medical facilities, cybersecurity, undersea cables, and space-based systems currently would populate a stadium-sized mosh pit. On these topics, our state isn’t deep, but way too wide and, sadly, shallow.

This isn’t the case overseas, where our allies are confronting these problems head-on. Besides defending our allies from overt attacks – which still must be a priority – the Pentagon should check out what it can learn from their homeland defense headaches. They’ve seen firsthand the future face of war. It’s time that the Pentagon prepare our government to face this future.

Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Arlington, Virginia, a nonprofit organization founded to promote a better understanding of strategic weapons proliferation issues among policymakers, scholars, and the media.