The following article was co-authored by R. James Woolsey and was published by National Review.
America is vulnerable to cyber warfare or a crippling EMP attack.
Revolutions in warfare, though they may be predicted by theorists, are often unnoticed by governments and their military establishments – until it is too late.
On November 11, 1940, during the Battle of Taranto, torpedo planes from the British aircraft carrier Illustrious sank the Italian battleship Conte di Cavour. It was the first time in history that an aircraft carrier sank a battleship.
The U.S. Navy did not notice the revolution in warfare at Taranto. But Imperial Japan did, and it taught the U.S. a bloody lesson about the new dominance of aircraft carriers in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Today the U.S. Navy, once skeptical of aircraft carriers until it lost much of the Pacific fleet, relies on the carrier as the chief instrument of U.S. power projection.
Did another revolution in warfare arrive, little noticed, on December 23, when an alleged cyber attack on the power grid plunged western Ukraine into a blackout? Some 700,000 homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region were without power, apparently because of Russian hackers armed with Russian malware called BlackEnergy.