Definition: Structure Hit

Our infrastructure is in peril.

Part of America’s Snivel War is going to include “Structure Hits” - attacks on infrastructure for a variety of motivations. I learned this phrase via Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, and this isn’t theoretical, it’s already been a problem here and it’s about to get much, much worse.

Let’s have a look at a few notable incidents.

Attention Conservation Notice:

Just surfacing an under-appreciated risk. I expect this is going to kick into high gear over the next year.

Defintion:

First, terrorism is an attack on a typically soft target that involves casualties, committed in an attempt to influence the political dynamic of the affected region.

Structure hits are going to be labeled terrorism, but they would be more correctly called sabotage. The type of actor involved in such things prefers an empty, parked airliner to one in the air. The optics are much better and it lowers their risk in executing the attack.

There will eventually be casualties even for the most careful actors, so sabotage/terrorism is definitely a spectrum social disorder.

Examples:

Every year there are wild land fire crew members who set fires, hoping for a paycheck. Even now, as dry and as crazy as our fire season has become, there’s always at least one. There are also always a couple of the obligatory homeless man sets fire stories. I’m not going to drag out a bunch of them, instead I’m going to focus on my first big event, the Tubbs Fire in 2017.

I was sitting at my workstation, when the lights flickered and the whole house shook. I thought it was an earthquake at first, because it was my first encounter with the violent Diablo winds of the Bay Area. The fire was so problematic because the ignition source was a PG&E electrical line that had some parts that were a century old. The fire didn’t emerge from a point source, it was a line fifty miles long, and one that went through the worst sort of country for fire fighting.

An ideologically motivated human from the American interior red states could recreate that situation pretty easily.

The Metcalf sniper attack involved two individuals firing at a remote PG&E substation, causing an outage and $15 million in equipment lost. They were wise enough to cut the fiber cables in the area, isolating the substation’s SCADA systems. Substations are built to just keep running when they’re cut off from the outside world, the cuts were done to eliminate as much of the security system as they could. The attack was still caught on a CCTV camera, but all that was seen were a few bullets striking the chain link fence.

Sometimes fiber optic cables are the primary goal, this is the thinking regarding the Chinese ship with a Russian captain who intentionally dragged their anchor for a hundred miles. I’ve worked on land based fiber systems and there’s an obscure little secret - every state has a locator service. You call the service, give them an address where you’re going to dig, and they contact the companies that have buried assets. A truck rolls and a guy paints lines on the ground showing where to avoid. Or … precisely where to go to land a hit.

Drone Zone:

I posted about Ed Nash’s Assassination Drone video two months ago, and focused on the potential for structure hits. Since sabotage targets are typically stationary, a drone can deliver a payload, return to its launch point, and the attack happens later. This separates the actor from the event in both space and time. Timers can be used rather than cellular or radio triggers, reducing the potential for attribution.

The path we are on, as a society, is going to lead to key infrastructure having drone detection, drone radio band jammers, and particularly sensitive locations may get short range air defenses. Rifles are used in Ukraine for this, but I imagine it’ll be 40mm grenade launcher based, as they’re the smallest thing we have that offers fragmentation rounds that will self destruct rather than raining like bullets would. This will limit the caliber of target that can be attacked, but make attribution harder, as events will occur further away from monitoring.

The jamming presents an interesting problem - it’s fine in rural areas where a facility has a goof buffer around it, but not so good in cities. A drone can pass unnoticed in the dark above a busy city street. We should be very thankful that shaped charge warheads like those harvested from the older Soviet designed RPG-7 are not readily available in this country. A properly shaped copper cone has an all but magical effect when coupled with high explosives - even the little half pound 40mm grenade HEDP round can punch through two inches of steel armor. Transformers are basically steel cans full of oil and even small units produce impressive blasts when they let go on their own.

Conclusion:

There is an implicit level of trust in our society that is going to unravel over the next year or so. Your mail may sit in an unsecured mailbox until you pick it up. You can park your car and mostly expect it will be in the same condition when you return (unless you happen to live here in San Leandro). These pleasant norms are fading in large cities due to fentanyl, but targets of opportunity will be giving way to targets of choice, and that won’t be correlated to population density or poverty.

What can you personally do about these things? Well … maybe ask a prepper? They’re the only ones vaguely ready for this. If I were to hit the lottery, I’d be looking for a place that has or could be built to have brick walls, solar cells in excess of my peak use, both diesel and natural gas generators (at opposite ends of the house!), farm style diesel and gasoline storage, both indoor and remote stores of potable water …

But very, VERY few of us can afford to live in a telco bunker, but if things are really bad, having something like that puts a bullseye on your back. I have a friend from clear back in my days on The Oil Drum who’d immigrated from China. He was old enough to recall the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and knew precisely how far hungry humans will wander on foot in an effort to secure food. He did not execute, but we discussed buying a farm near Fort Drum, halfway between Syracuse and Ottowa. Had I been physically well at the time I’d have taken him on the proffer of managing it.

A little effort can sew a lot of chaos, as we saw with the Paris Olympics.