Expert: If US helps electricity in Africa, it can protect against EMPs

By Josh Peterson | Watchdog.org

President Obama’s plans to commit $7 billion to the electrification of six African countries has at least one security expert questioning Obama’s concern about the security of the nation’s own power grid.

Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, blasted Obama over his administration’s Power Africa initiative — a collaboration between the United States and African governments, and private sector entities, to build up the electrical grids of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania.

“If Mr. Obama has billions and billions of dollars to build a 21st Century electric grid for Africans, surely he can allocate a much smaller amount to secure ours,” wrote Gaffney on Thursday.

Despite repeated warnings from security experts about the vulnerability of the civilian portions of the U.S. power grid, a problem analysts estimate could be solved for about $2 billion, the federal government has lagged behind the states in its response to the problem.

Security experts have warned for years of the impending threat to U.S. economic and national security posed by an electromagnetic pulse attack on the nation’s power grid, as previously reported by Watchdog.org.

Congress even decided to pass a bill funding the U.S. intelligence community that lacked any requirement from for the director of national intelligence to report to Congress about the EMP weapons capabilities of U.S. adversaries such as North Korea and Iran.

Several other bills to address the problem are pending before Congress: the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act; the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act and the Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act.

Contact Josh Peterson at jpeterson@watchdog.org. Follow Josh on Twitter at @jdpeterson