How U.S. Cyberspace Could Go Dark & What to Do About It | Gen. Robert Spalding

🚨 America's digital infrastructure is dangerously vulnerable. A high-altitude nuke from China or another adversary could knock out U.S. comms coast to coast, explains Gen. Robert Spalding.

Spalding, a former B-2 stealth bomber pilot, saw the vulnerabilities in our networks firsthand during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Troops redeployed from Iraq said it felt like a warzone.

He wondered: How is it that the U.S. has ways of communicating through nuclear war but no way to keep phones on after a natural disaster?

Our smartphones today can survive an EMP attack and still operate. But the towers and cloud servers it connects to are down in an instant.

The problem is America's entire telecom & cloud system is centralized—because it’s cheaper than building decentralized systems.

For a B-2 pilot like Spalding, it means an adversary just needs to hit a few targets—think a few AWS, T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T sites—to knock out communications and computing services for the entire United States.

Spalding's solution:

Hardened, decentralized network nodes. Think cloud + the cell network smashed together in a disaster and EMP-proof box and spread all across the country. So even if the main grid goes out, your phone & essential apps—like health, safety, and financial services—still work.

After six years of development, he's now deploying it. It's called SEMPRE.