It's near the end of the new president's first year in office. The 2017 holiday season is in full swing, and the White House is hoping that Christmas shoppers will help lift the economy out of its post-election doldrums. But suddenly that's the least of its worries…suddenly the lights go off in Chicago and its immediate environs, the result of a massive power outage that has all the signatures of a cyber incident.

This is not a work of fiction. It's nightmare scenarios like this that keep government (and increasingly, private sector) emergency planners awake at night, and it was just such a "lights out" event that signaled the beginning of the National Academy of Public Administration's second in its series of Presidential Transition table-top exercises. Designed to demonstrate the value of such strategic foresight tools to the next administration, as well as to provide insights into the particular focus of the exercise—in this case, cybersecurity—they are being developed and delivered by Booz Allen Hamilton's Center for War Gaming and National Strategy.

And ours added a twist to really stretch the limits of interagency coordination. Despite initial appearances, this wasn't about getting electricity restored to Chicago after a cyberattack on the electrical power grid in the dead of winter. Nor was it about calling out the National Guard and setting up shelters for those most immediately affected by the outage. Our federal, state and local government, and industry first responders know how to do that, in part because they regularly practice it (truth in advertising, Booz Allen helps them).

For example, the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy regularly conduct an exercise series called GRIDEX with the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) and the Nation's electrical power industry in order to prepare for just such an event. That's not to minimize the challenge, especially if the outage is cyber-related, but at least we're prepared for the initial response.

The lights are back on, but…

But in our scenario, we assumed that power had been restored, the immediate crisis and its 'first-order' effects largely over. Instead, we asked our participants—senior political appointees and career officials, both current and former, from DHS, Energy, the NSC, Treasury, Defense, and OMB, even a state and local government representative—to deal with something we don't really prepare for: all of the unexpected second- and third-order effects that may stem from such an incident:

It's been three days since the Great Chicago Blackout of 2017, and thanks to quick action by government and industry, the electricity is flowing again. The lights are back on, as well as the heat, but the effects of the incident continue to reverberate across the nation and the globe. Air transport remains gridlocked worldwide, the holiday shopping season is a disaster, and stock markets are in turmoil. Videos of bare grocery store shelves and long gas lines have gone viral on social media, and every time the lights flicker somewhere in the country (and not just our country!), there's a "oh no, it's happening here" panic. What does the president do?

These are the things that should keep our political leaders, elected as well as appointed, awake at night. It's those second- and third-order effects—on the economy, air and ground transportation, food and fuel distribution, social media, etc.—that can quickly make a bad local situation an even worse national or international one. These are truly wicked problems that require far more than a technical response, a classic 'whole of government' (indeed, 'whole of nation') challenge. And we just don't do those very well…in part because it's not the planners that will have to deal with them, but rather a whole constellation of political appointees and public officials.

That was certainly one of the key insights from our half-day simulation. We divided our 20 participants into two teams—one representing a group of trusted presidential advisers, the other a group of senior career officials from all the relevant federal agencies—and we asked them to prepare short-term, 'what do we do now' recommendations for a prime time presidential speech to the nation. And in the middle of their deliberations, we added another twist: the Intelligence Community's assessment that the cyberattack that perpetrated the outage was likely by a nation-state proxy.

The timing of our event was prescient. Several of our participants had been intimately involved in the months-long development of the federal government's blueprint for interagency coordination during large-scale cyber incidents—just like the one we posed—and it gave them, as well as the rest of our participants, an opportunity to test some of its tenets against a real-world scenario. And as we know, that policy was officially issued as Presidential Decision Document (PDD) 41 on July 26, just a few days after our exercise.

From operational to strategic

Fast forward the scenario by three weeks (one of the advantages of a simulation). We then asked the two teams to propose a long term, multi-year strategy that, in the hypothetical words of POTUS, ensures the country "…that this will never happen again."

Things have settled down a bit in the weeks since the blackout. Globally, air transport is largely back to normal, with most of the tens of thousands of stranded passengers now home…just not in time for the holidays. While the holiday shopping season never recovered, panicked runs on food and gasoline (driven by unchecked social media) have subsided, and stock indexes are approaching their pre-blackout levels. However, it's also become clear that parts of our electrical power grid remain vulnerable, so the nation remains on edge and is demanding answers. And unfortunately, there are no quick (or cheap) fixes.

Is the president's demand an impossible task? Maybe, on at least two counts…first, we already know that we don't do 'whole of nation' planning very well, much less execution. And second, we also know we should never say never. But is the president's ask an implausible one? Not at all. One could easily imagine a relatively new POTUS addressing an anxious nation and desperately wanting to restore its confidence in the administration and our government.

In fact, that became one of the most compelling insights from the simulation.  During the exercise, and long after it was over, participants struggled with just how candid and transparent an administration should be in such a scenario, when candor may actually fuel more panic; on the other hand, if exposed, anything less than complete transparency could be seen as breaking trust with the American people, with implications that may be far worse.

Our participants also struggled with the perennial 'who should be in charge' question, especially for the long-term effort; everyone agreed that the president needed a single point of accountability (and in theory, authority) to drive the national effort, but given the agency and other equities involved, there was little agreement over who that should be. The good news is that this is exactly what PDD-41 is intended to establish!

Finally, the simulation made it clear that neither of our hypothetical groups of advisers—neither the administration insiders nor the bureaucrats—deliberating alone was optimal. It took a combination of both perspectives, political and technical, insider and interagency, to consider all of the angles.

But the most compelling insight of all? That the next administration needs to do more of these 'whole of government/whole of nation' exercises. Not to predict the future (that's not possible), but to prepare for it…simulations that do not just stress test its crisis management skills, but also ones that sharpen its strategic leadership abilities. And it means committing the time to personally participate; the next administration can't leave them to the experts and the emergency planners, although they clearly need to be part of the process.


We know that's a lot to ask of a new president. The press and pressures of the morning's headlines will make that time commitment problematic. But when the stuff hits the fan, and the president's team can say 'we've seen this before,' it will be worth every minute they spend getting ready.

Dan G. Blair was named president and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration in July 2011 and announced his departure Aug. 3. Ron Sanders is a vice president and fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton and former chief human capital officer for the intelligence community.  

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