Vital Systems Security

A recent trilateral powwow originally designed to focus on economic and security issues across Canada, Mexico and the United States, has become the principal venue through which said countries are coordinating their pandemic preparedness efforts. What this coordination entails is an interesting question. A recent piece from the informative CIDRAP news service describes a recently released report detailing some of the issues the countries see themselves facing. One issue (comprising one chapter in this report): critical infrastructure. One strategy to tackle the problem of critical infrastructure protection: Resiliency. None of this is surprising or new. What is interesting, to me anyway, is how these concepts will ‘operate’ or be actualized in practice in and across these different national contexts. Is there such a thing as North American Critical Infrastructure? How about North American Resiliency?

For some reason, all of this calls to mind the notion of “regionalization”, which has been pushed — albeit not very hard — by a number of federal agencies and states which foresee advantages to realizing efficiencies in preparedness efforts — check out an example from AHRQ here. These efficiencies are based not only in economics, per se, but in geographies as well. Counties have banded together, as have states, in a variety of different emergency services and disaster preparedness contexts (e.g., one EMS agency covering several counties; states and counties signing mutual aid agreements in times of need, etc.) for decades. The dynamics of multinational ‘regionalization,’ I suspect, is substantially different.

The VSS collaboration page on the main ARC site has been updated, with some new links to publications and events. More to come soon.

Andy and I have written about the origins of “vulnerability thinking” and many dimensions of vital systems security in total war and strategic bombing. In reading Churchill’s “Their Finest Hour,” the second volume of his four-volume series of World War II, I came across a couple interesting nuggets along these lines. In World War II, concern with vital systems was essential to strategic thought on both sides, and at certain points was the dominant consideration. After the fall of France, when Hitler turned his attention to Britain, there was a kind of military stalemate, or at least a situation in which neither side could turn its major strength on the other. The overwhelmingly dominant German army was prevented from invasion across the channel by British naval dominance. Churchill claims that he never believed that Germany could launch a successful invasion. As a consequence, the major concerns revolved around attacks on vital systems. Churchill writes that he considered German u-boat attacks on shipping to be the most serious strategic threat, and the Germans engaged in various forms of terror bombing and strategic bombing during the Battle of Britain, particularly on major centers of industrial production (particularly aircraft production — which seems to have been rather concentrated). Churchill also has some very interesting things to say about vital systems and civil defense, among which the following about preparations for a German invasion. Note the interesting use of quotes around ‘vulnerable points’ — perhaps it was something of a neologism at the time:

Obstacles were placed on many thousand square miles of Britain to impede the landing of air-borne troops. All our aerodromes, radar stations, and fuel depots…needed defence by special garrisons and by their own airmen. Many thousands of ‘vulnerable points’ — bridges, power-stations, depots, vital factories, and the like — had to be guarded day and night from sabotage or sudden onset….The destruction of port facilities, the cratering of key roads, the paralysis of motor transport and of telephones and telegraph stations, of rolling stock or permanent way, before they passed out of our hands were planned to the last detail. Yet, despite all these wise and necessary precautions…there was no question of a scorched earth policy. England was to be defended by its people, not destroyed (p. 177).