Jim Dempsey, Andrew J. Grotto
Secretary Pete Hegseth has consistently said that his defining priority is to ensure the lethality of America’s warfighters. This obviously depends on their having the most advanced and effective tanks, drones, missiles, and warships. The military doesn’t produce these things itself. Instead, it relies on private contractors to supply the tools of war. Faced with massive dysfunctionality in the procurement process, Hegseth recently directed a major reform of military acquisitions, “to accelerate fielding of urgently needed capabilities to our warriors” and “maximize their combat readiness.”
Lethality, however, also depends on some pretty mundane things, like electricity, oil and gas, water, telecommunications, and rail transit. An interruption in any one of them could disrupt and delay force projection.
For almost all of these critical services, military installations in the U.S. are dependent on private contractors. That’s because most critical infrastructure in the United States is owned and operated by the private sector. (Much of what isn’t owned privately is owned by municipalities, counties, and rural cooperatives, which also contract with the Pentagon.) Those contractors are, in turn, dependent on operational technology (OT): sensors, regulators, switches, valves, and other devices that monitor and control physical processes. That OT—like the information technology (IT) that has long been the focus of national cybersecurity policy—is vulnerable to cyberattack. The evidence is clear: Foreign adversaries have targeted, and have succeeded in gaining access to, the OT of critical infrastructure.
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