Secure in its supreme arrogance and behind its walls, fences, and armed Palace guards, the Power doesn’t realize this\u2014or just doesn’t care, perhaps\u2014but it’s a long-established truism of guerrilla warfare that guile and relentless determination can, and quite often does, trump sheer weight of numbers.<\/p>\n
Shock the system<\/strong><\/a>
\nJust one example of how the government could lose a civil conflict<\/em><\/p>\nI keep reading comments from arrogant progressives who delight in the assault on gun rights led by their elected and appointed allies in the recent weeks since a madman gunned down innocent children in a school in Newtown, CT.<\/p>\n
They seem to think they can impose any indignity and infringment they want without repercussion, because the President of the United States is one of them, he\u2019s the leader of the nation\u2019s military, and he can therefore win any battle against America\u2019s freedom fighters who might rise up to restore their constitutional rights currently under assault.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t understand asymmetrical warfare in the slightest, much less how it would be waged here. Let me give you just one small example of how lone wolves or small teams can strike well beyond their size against a near defenseless leviathan.<\/p>\n
After the Dot Com bubble burst in the early 2000s, I took a job in upstate New York for a subcontractor of Central Hudson Gas and Electric. I was part of a crew sent out to map electrical transmission line power poles and towers via GPS, check the tower footings for integrity, check the best routes for access, etc.<\/p>\n
It meant I rode quads (ATVs) through mountains, swamps, forests, neighborhoods and farms all over southern New York, in winter\u2019s icy chill and blowing snow, and in summer\u2019s melting heat. It was exhausting work, often in beautiful scenery.<\/p>\n
We probably averaged 20 miles of line a day, and that over the course of the contract I easily rode a thousand miles. I can tell you stories of flipping quads, sinking quads, going down a mountain without brakes, almost hitting deer at top speed, and parking on the remains of an electrocuted bear, but that isn\u2019t really what I remember most about the job.<\/p>\n
No, what I remember most about the job were the days we spent up near the\u00a0Rondout Reservoir<\/a>. What I remember in specific was discovering how powerless the government was to protect key utilities.<\/p>\n
In a post-9\/11 New York, where terrorism was foremost on the minds of many, you simply didn\u2019t mess around near New York City\u2019s water supply, and Roundout was part of that equation.<\/p>\n
The thought that we could be viewed as a threat as we rode the hills around the reservoir for several days never crossed our minds, because we were focused on our jobs minding the electrical transmission lines, not the waters flowing nearby.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until late on the second day, where we parked right beside the dam\u2019s offices, that law enforcement caught up to us. Apparently we\u2019d been the on again, off again suspects in a low intensity chase for two days, with the law enforcement agency that was in charge of providing security for the reservoir (NYDNR, maybe?) trying to chase us down, without any luck. They didn\u2019t catch us until we parked the truck beside their HQ on the afternoon of the second day and began unloading our gear right under their windows.<\/p>\n
That it took them 14 hours of time \u201con the run\u201d in the area (30 hours total time) to \u201ccatch\u201d us was a little unsettling. Then I started thinking about the much more fragile structures we were working beside routinely.<\/p>\n
You see, we\u2019d ridden up to edge of the Danskammer and Roseton power generating stations, and a dozen or more unattended substations during the course of this contract, without being challenged at all.<\/p>\n
Substations like the one above could be accessed not just from surface roads, but from access trails under the power lines by people with UTVs, ATVs, and motorcycles.<\/p>\n
Just like the residential transformers in your neighborhood, the transformers in substations are cooled with a form of mineral oil. If someone decides to\u00a0blast a transformer at its base<\/a>\u00a0as prepper Bryan Smith did, and the oil drains out, then the transformer either burns out catastrophically, or if the utility is lucky, a software routine notices the problem and shuts the substation (or at least the affected portion) down. The power must then be rerouted through the remaining grid until that transformer can be replaced and any other resulting damage can be repaired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That’s from a 2013 piece by the late, great Bob Owens, which reads today like prophecy. As we’ve seen lately, not just in upstate NY but all across the nation<\/a>, little if anything has changed since then.<\/p>\n
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