Eminent journalist Ted Koppel has ventured in what is
seemingly a mundane and unexciting area: the electric power grid in his latest
book: Lights Out. What he neglected to say is that the book is actually a smoke
screen for what he really wants to talk about: the national security apparatus,
our lack of infrastructure, planning, and a clue as to how to proceed from
keeping all of our citizens safe and fed through an extended disaster. He used
the scenario of a cyber-attack to take down the national power grid as a
conversation starter.
The electric power grid is an intricate and complicated
piece of human construct; it ranks as the most ingenious human invention ever,
ahead of the automobile, ahead of even the internet. The scale of the
enterprise as it grew over the years is staggering. Since its growth came about
gradually, and in an unplanned manner, the shape and form of the grid does not
resemble anything that was well planned, it is a hodge podge of usable bits
strung together to work together. There is some logic and reasoning to is,
engineers being engineers, the national grid was redrawn, rebuilt, and
redesigned to accommodate the latest
state of the art technology. Unfortunately, the time lag for something that
size is measured in decades.
Mr. Koppel’s selection of the national power grid is a
prescient one. It is probably one of the most trusted and taken for granted
piece of technology that we have in our life. No one gives a second thought to
the reliability and resiliency of the entire grid. This is as intended by the
electric utilities and the planners of the grid. It is, however, a misguided
illusion, as Mr. Koppel pointed out in very prescient fashion in this book. He
goes into detail in the first part of his book. He lays out in some detail, but
not enough detail, about the vulnerabilities of the grid. He also failed to
research deeper into the technological advances that have been advanced since
the 2003 blackout: the work that the DOE and NIST had proposed. The idea is
called the Smart Grid, and it encompasses a massive amount of forward looking
thinking and technological to come to such a conclusion. The fact that this
concept was completely ignored in the book seems to be a massive oversight at
best and a failure of clear vision and rational judgement at worst. Because
even though the idea of the Smart Grid may not be the solution that Mr. Koppel
is seeking, it, and the myriad of ideas the Smart Grid encompasses, may
reasonably alleviate some of the unknown threats that Mr. Koppel is addressing.
Mr. Koppel does do a very good job laying out the threat
that he wants to talk about: the threat of cyber-attacks that may come
stealthily, which can be launched by anyone rather than from a monolithic
superpower, and may result in a crippled continent for months if not years. He
does this brilliantly in Parts I and II of this book.
Unfortunately, this brings us to Part Iii of Lights Out. Mr.
Koppel chose to deviate from the path and he began to delve into some examples
of survivalists, preppers, and four chapters on the Mormons and their massive
and sophisticated food, fuel, and consumer product distribution network. While
all of these stories are interesting, I learned quite a bit from his forays
into the prepper world, it certainly does not address the imminent danger that
he so eloquently addressed in the previous two parts of the book.
The point being made by Mr. Koppel, is that the non-existent
planning on the part of the federal, state, and local government, or the
laughingly elementary plans are logistically impossible and unrealistic.
In the end, Mr. Koppel returns to the point that there is a
dire need for the government and the private sector to overcome the comfortable
and unrealistic view that something like an cyber-attack on the national grid
is not imminent and would be far down in the list of imminent disasters that
could befall us. In other words, he is preaching that Black Swans, as describe
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is quite real.
In his summary, Mr. Koppel also indirectly appropriated Mr.
Taleb’s idea of the state of anti-fragile, i.e. be in a state of preparedness
in order to not only be resilient in the face of unknown events, but be able to
benefit and profit from the event.
The tendency of modern bureaucracy to lean towards Just-In-Time
planning and thinking is one of the themes that Mr. Koppel drew which resonated
with me. His comparison of this probable situation with the Katrina disaster
eloquently pointed out the tendency for us to only do what is necessary after
the disaster has happened. Why be prepared for the unknown unless you knew what
the unknown is, why stockpile supplies until you know the disaster is imminent.
Mr. Koppel’s point is that you will never know what is coming until it gets
here, and then it is too late.
In the end, Mr. Koppel is a talented and detailed story
teller. He is also an inveterate name dropper. Of course, being Ted Koppel, you
have quite an impressive list of name you can call upon to name drop. He does
so with such frequency that what was once just impressive became a bit forced
and awkward.
I feel like this was a missed opportunity. Mr. Koppel could
have made a stronger, more informed case for the need to invest in infrastructure
which is anti-fragile to the new threat on the national grid. He could have
made it a goal to examine the ideas being driven within the electric utility
industry to buttress the existing national grid and to create the Smart Grid,
which is designed with the cyber-security function in mind. He could have
foregone some of the interesting digressions in this book to lay out the
fundamental problems that creates the threat that he wished to examine. Instead
he wrote a fine book, an interesting book, but a very flawed book, from the
standpoint of achieving the purpose that he sought to achieve.
