Then you're missing the point.
If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.
Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.
The fact that the Texas outages killed anyone is a testament to the fact that the USA is, apparently, a developing nation, possibly going through a rough patch.
It’s not like there wasn’t enough generators or fuel in the nation to ameliorate that crisis. It was that, like all developing nations, resources are not available at the point of need despite their widespread availability.
Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.
"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...
Yes, there is the risk of cascading failures, some industrial processes are very hard to re-start once interrupted (or even impossible) and the lead time on 'some transformers' can be a year or more. These are nothing like the kind that you can buy at the corner hardware store. A couple of hundred tons or so for the really large ones.
Grid infra is quite expensive, hard to replace and has very long lead times.
The very worst you could do is induce oscillations.
Vietnam too.
If you succeed in attacking the grid, you achieve the same widespread industry impact, without the cost of the munitions.
It can take decades to recover from a cyber attack like this, if it succeeds.
These attacks are widespread, damaging, and the repercussions are felt for decades in their wake. We _are_ being carpet bombed, and the costs for the victims are ongoing and growing. The collateral damage is everywhere.
Do you really think there's no impact?
> Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.
> We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the United States. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.
> https://www.intelligence.gov.au/news/asio-annual-threat-asse...
The counter-strategies that the British used to defend against German strikes included "switch off all the lights at night so they don't know where they are" and "order newspapers to lie about which part of the city was damaged in order that spies reading British newspapers and reporting back to HQ said missiles fell short/went too far, causing HQ to incorrectly compensate on the next strike". I don't know if the reverse was true, despite now living in Berlin.
Everyone's supply chains were also much shallower, and equipment much cruder and therefore easier to make (though also less efficient). Half of London or Berlin losing electricity makes a much smaller difference when far less was electrified in the first place, e.g. loss of electricity for a heat pump doesn't matter so much when the terraces and apartment blocks have internal fireplaces and regular coal deliveries.
Also re Vietnam, it took until 1997 to return to the per-person energy use it had in 1970: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/vietnam
And until 1993 to reach the not-adjusted-for-population level.
And the electricity graphs don't even go back far enough to see what that war was like, that's all energy.