Finally we have leaders who are taking seriously the threat of EMPs!

In the Hill, Peter Pry reports,

...The Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Threats, signed on March 26 by President Trump, is an excellent first step toward achieving national preparedness. It seeks to implement core recommendations of the Congressional EMP Commission on an accelerated basis.

Among the best and strongest features of the EMP Executive Order is putting the White House in charge of national EMP preparedness, rather than relying on the Department of Energy (DOE) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead.

The order states that the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), working with the National Security Council and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “shall coordinate the development and implementation of executive branch actions to assess, prioritize, and manage the risks of EMPs.”

White House leadership on EMP preparedness is imperative. Both Energy and Homeland Security have a long history of underestimating and under-prioritizing the EMP threat.

Among its many strong features, President Trump’s executive order combines EMP and cybersecurity. It directs DHS’s secretary to coordinate with the Energy and Defense secretaries, other agencies and the private sector to “develop a plan to mitigate the effects of EMPs on the vulnerable priority-critical infrastructures.”

The president’s order recognizes that an EMP attack, in adversary military doctrine and planning, is a dimension of cyber warfare. Worst-case cyber attack scenarios that could kill millions of Americans — by, for example, causing a protracted blackout of electric grids through cyber-induced over-voltages, or by manipulating controls to destroy transformers — can be addressed by many of the protective measures long recommended by the Congressional EMP Commission.

One of the most welcome and needed features of the EMP Executive Order is the requirement that the vulnerability of vital critical-infrastructure equipment be established through empirical testing in EMP simulators.

Read more here.