December 19, 2025
No Grid, No Glory: What History Teaches Us About the Next Major War
This article was originally published on The National Interest.
The Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy goes to great lengths to do what every good strategist is taught: align means and ends in a coherent and credible way. Reviving our defense industrial base and achieving energy dominance are laudable ends for a 21st-century strategy. But the essential means of realizing those goals, the nation’s electric grid, remains mired in the 20th century. It is fragmented, aging, and underbuilt. Unless the United States invests in expanding and fortifying the grid, we not only risk falling short of our strategic aspirations, but we also put our national defense in jeopardy.
Over the last several decades, the U.S. military has transformed into a globally networked force. Remotely piloted aircraft and advanced cyber technology are part of the fabric of modern warfare, with troops often performing these missions from installations right here at home. That has made the electric grid, which serves our installations, essential to all military missions, including those overseas. And we have dramatically underinvested in it.
Strengthening transmission, modernizing our infrastructure, and aligning energy planning with national defense needs are not merely about strengthening America’s resilience — they are pivotal to maintaining peace in our time.
Today, America’s bulk electric system — the poles and wires that powered the United States through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is dangerously ill-equipped for the kind of great power conflict the U.S. military is planning. Take the example of Winter Storm Uri in February 2021. A historic ice storm swept across Texas and forced the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to shed 20 gigawatts of load from its system, the largest single directed load shed in North American history. That one event caused multiday outages at 12 of 15 military installations in Texas and left many troops and military families stranded.
While Winter Storm Uri stands out as a cautionary tale of the risks facing the grid, it’s not an outlier. Across the United States, threats from wildfires and other extreme weather events are routinely forcing utilities to de-energize power lines, and malicious actors are constantly testing the robustness of the system. The simple fact is that if a major war were to break out tomorrow, the power grid that supports nearly every military installation, weapons factory, and AI data center will be the first — and potentially weakest — line of defense.
Read the full article on The National Interest.
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