Black sky hazards: Systems engineering as a unique tool to prevent national catastrophe

Abstract

Growing risks to our tightly interwoven infrastructures, on an unprecedented scale, have put national continuity, and our lives, in jeopardy. There is now a unique opportunity to meet this challenge. Emerging "Black Sky" hazards ranging from large-scale cyber or electromagnetic-pulse attacks to extreme space weather or regional earthquake zones could cause subcontinent-scale power outages - a new class of extreme risks to the United States and the industrialized world. Water, fuel, and the other utilities our lives depend on cannot function without electricity, and cascading infrastructure failures would disrupt the resources essential for power grid restoration and restart, amplifying and expanding the outage and the cascading failures. If we cannot find a solution, the first of these extreme hazards to strike the United States would be devastating. It would mean the end of our society, as we know it today. Over the last five decades, U.S. aerospace companies invented, developed, and refined a powerful new methodology to found our high-tech world. Smoothly integrating the hyper-complexities of diverse disciplines into the dependable high-tech tools and devices we now take for granted, systems engineering has become the fundamental organizing principle used to integrate and transform disparate technologies into satellites, aircraft carriers, and spaceships. As the new Administration in Washington D.C. begins detailing its ambitious goals for securing the nation's infrastructures, understanding the Black Sky resilience shortfalls and interdependencies putting our lifeline infrastructures and national continuity at risk will be essential. To accomplish this, and look to industry to build the coordinated solutions that will be essential, systems engineering will be an indispensable tool. And the work has already begun.