Nuclear EMP attack is part of the military doctrines, plans and exercises of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran for a revolutionary new way of warfare against military forces and civilian critical infrastructures by cyber, sabotage, and EMP. Significantly, because EMP attack entails detonating a nuclear weapon at such high altitude that no blast or other prompt effects injurious to humans are delivered, only the EMP that immediately damages only electronics, potential adversaries do not appear to regard nuclear EMP attack as an act of nuclear warfare. Ignorance of the military doctrines of potential adversaries and a failure of U.S. strategic imagination, as noted in military writings of potentially hostile powers, is setting America up for an EMP Pearl Harbor. EMP is essentially an anti-technology weapon--and perhaps the perfect "silver bullet" to defeat and humble the high-tech military of the United States that is the basis for its claim to be "the world's only superpower."
In the opening paragraphs of the 9/11 Commission Report published in the wake of the attacks of September 11th 2001, the term "failure of imagination" is repeated three times. Specifically, "Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management." Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, Director of the EMP Task Force and the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, has served in the House Armed Services Committee and the CIA. His new book will help policymakers better imagine the most dangerous threat to our survival - nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) - and how our nation's adversaries have demonstrated capability and intent to use EMP against the U.S. and our allies. The Long Sunday--Election Day 2016 - Inauguration Day 2017--Nuclear EMP Attack Scenarios warns that the EMP threat is not merely theoretical, but real, and could be upon us as soon as the 74-days between Election Day and Inauguration Day, which period Dr. Pry describes as "The Long Sunday." The short monograph does not predict that a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack is likely to occur between the national elections on November 8 and the next presidential inauguration on January 20. But it is a sign of just how deeply troubled and unpredictable are the times in which we now live, when almost every day brings another unpleasant surprise, that any or all of the scenarios this report shall describe are entirely plausible. The "unpleasant surprise" is a high-altitude nuclear EMP attack that could permanently blackout the nation's electric grid and kill 90 percent of Americans through starvation and societal collapse, warns the Congressional EMP Commission and The Long Sunday. A true Paul Revere of our generation, Dr. Pry warns EMP is a threat unique in history, empowering failed states and terrorists to destroy Western Civilization. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on a Sunday, when they knew our guard was down. We hope that Dr. Pry's book will correct the failure of imagination about the existential threat from EMP, and avert an electronic Pearl Harbor against entire nations. We believe the survival of America and our allies depends upon it.
"Blackout Warfare" is the term used in this report to describe a revolutionary new way of warfare planned by Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that is still little understood in the United States, but poses an imminent and existential threat to Western Civilization. These potential adversaries plan to use cyber-attacks, sabotage, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons in combination to blackout national electric grids to achieve quick and decisive victory. Blackout Warfare that paralyzes the U.S. electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures--communications, transportation, natural gas and petroleum, business and industry, food and water infrastructures, and the military--could kill most Americans. The EMP Commission estimates up to 90% of the U.S. population could die from a nationwide blackout lasting one year. The military would be paralyzed by a nationwide blackout, as CONUS military bases depend for 99% of their electricity upon the civilian electric grid. For the first time in the West, this report fights back against looming catastrophe by thinking about and planning for Blackout Warfare the way our potential adversaries do.
This book outlines the concept of Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) and demonstrates its relevance for understanding contemporary conflicts. Non-kinetic modes of attack and war waged by groups or non-state actors at the societal level has been termed 5GW. This book discusses the theory of generational warfare and explores the key ideas of 5GW, such as secrecy, the manipulation of proxies, the manipulation of identity and culture (including disinformation and big data), and the use of psychological warfare. These techniques are used to achieve strategic objectives, such as inducing desired behaviour and controlling human terrain, without resorting to overt war or overt violence. The text expands the debate on 5GW by exploring emerging technologies and how they could be used for maliciously shaping human society and even for maliciously changing the genetic makeup of a population for the purpose of unprecedented social control. The work closes with comments on the possibility of a Sixth Generation of Warfare, which targets technical systems to possibly collapse a society through strategic sabotage. Overall, the book demonstrates the relevance of 5GW for understanding contemporary conflicts, from the Arab Spring to the war in Ukraine, in terms of the need for dominating the human domain. This book will be of interest to students of security and technology, defence studies and International Relations.
Many senior army officials still claim that if they had been given enough soldiers and weapons, the United States could have won the war in Vietnam. In this probing analysis of U.S. military policy in Vietnam, career army officer and strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., argues that precisely because of this mindset the war was lost before it was fought. The army assumed that it could transplant to Indochina the operational methods that had been successful in the European battle theaters of World War II, an approach that proved ill-suited to the way the Vietnamese Communist forces fought. Theirs was a war of insurgency, and counterinsurgency, Krepinevich contends, requires light infantry formations, firepower restraint, and the resolution of political and social problems within the nation. To the very end, top military commanders refused to recognize this. Krepinevich documents the deep division not only between the American military and civilian leaders over the very nature of the war, but also within the U.S. Army itself. Through extensive research in declassified material and interviews with officers and men with battlefield experience, he shows that those engaged in the combat understood early on that they were involved in a different kind of conflict. Their reports and urgings were discounted by the generals, who pressed on with a conventional war that brought devastation but little success. A thorough analysis of the U.S. Army's role in the Vietnam War, The Army and Vietnam demonstrates with chilling persuasiveness the ways in which the army was unprepared to fight—lessons applicable to today's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
War at the Speed of Light describes the revolutionary and ever-increasing role of directed-energy weapons (such as laser, microwave, electromagnetic pulse, and cyberspace weapons) in warfare. Louis A. Del Monte delineates the threat that such weapons pose to disrupting the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which has kept the major powers of the world from engaging in nuclear warfare. Potential U.S. adversaries, such as China and Russia, are developing hypersonic missiles and using swarming tactics as a means to defeat the U.S. military. In response, the U.S. Department of Defense established the 2018 National Security Strategy, emphasizing directed-energy weapons, which project devastation at the speed of light and are capable of destroying hypersonic missiles and enemy drones and missile swarms. Del Monte analyzes how modern warfare is changing in three fundamental ways: the pace of war is quickening, the rate at which weapons project devastation is reaching the speed of light, and cyberspace is now officially a battlefield. In this acceleration of combat called “hyperwar,” Del Monte shows how disturbingly close the world is to losing any deterrence to nuclear warfare.
Nearly 40 years after the concept of finite deterrence was popularized by the Johnson administration, nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) thinking appears to be in decline. The United States has rejected the notion that threatening population centers with nuclear attacks is a legitimate way to assure deterrence. Most recently, it withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement based on MAD. American opposition to MAD also is reflected in the Bush administration's desire to develop smaller, more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of innocent civilians killed in a nuclear strike. Still, MAD is influential in a number of ways. First, other countries, like China, have not abandoned the idea that holding their adversaries' cities at risk is necessary to assure their own strategic security. Nor have U.S. and allied security officials and experts fully abandoned the idea. At a minimum, acquiring nuclear weapons is still viewed as being sensible to face off a hostile neighbor that might strike one's own cities. Thus, our diplomats have been warning China that Japan would be under tremendous pressure to go nuclear if North Korea persisted in acquiring a few crude weapons of its own. Similarly, Israeli officials have long argued, without criticism, that they would not be second in acquiring nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Indeed, given that Israelis surrounded by enemies that would not hesitate to destroy its population if they could, Washington finds Israel's retention of a significant nuclear capability totally "understandable."
Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) manmade or natural, from solar superstorms, can blackout electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures putting at risk the lives of millions. 9 of 10 Americans could die from starvation, disease, or societal collapse from a nuclear EMP attack that blacks-out the U.S. for a year. A solar superstorm could blackout electric grids worldwide, putting at risk the lives of billions. A small heroic band of scientists and national security experts serving on the Congressional EMP Commission have been striving for 20 years to protect America from the existential threat that is EMP. Their war to save America from ignorant armies that are the government bureaucracy, electric utility lobbies, and an irresponsible press is not yet won, and may soon be lost.
This is a book about strategy and war fighting. It contains 11 essays which examine topics such as military operations against a well-armed rogue state, the potential of parallel warfare strategy for different kinds of states, the revolutionary potential of information warfare, the lethal possibilities of biological warfare and the elements of an ongoing revolution in military affairs. The purpose of the book is to focus attention on the operational problems, enemy strategies and threat that will confront U.S. national security decision makers in the twenty-first century.
