Governments are telling people to prepare for at least 72 hours of disruption. The Pentagon has unveiled a plan to operate bases for 90 days in the event of widespread blackouts. And security experts are warning about swarms of AI agents targeting infrastructure.
On the November 2, 2026, episode of Open Circuit, Jonathon Monken told hosts Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin that the risk to the grid is very real and significantly elevated.
Jonathon Monken brings three vantage points to the question. He served 24 years in the U.S. Army, the last 13 as a cyber operations officer. He was senior director of system resilience at PJM, and he directed the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.
What to Watch
A Lower Barrier To Entry. It used to take a nation-state to go after critical infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and China were about the only countries with the people to do it. Now off-the-shelf AI tools can do what used to take an entire cyber brigade, in the hands of people who may not grasp the human cost of what they’re doing.
Where The Grid Is Exposed. More than 3,000 electric utilities do not all have the same financial, operational, or technical tools, and old vulnerabilities persist; the PHP flaw sat undiscovered for 20 years. One incident is manageable. A shared vulnerability exploited across dozens or hundreds of utilities in multiple regions at once would exceed the collective ability to respond.
Defense Readiness Depends On The Grid. The Pentagon’s FORTRESS America initiative aims to keep installations running through 90 days of blackouts. Jon supports adding generation and hardening infrastructure on bases. He also stressed that installations depend on the communities, infrastructure, and defense industrial base around them. What must account for defense energy needs as a formal part of grid planning. Converge Strategies’ research on Unleashing the Grid outlines how we get there.
A Foundational Shift. Jon outlines why we have to treat AI-enabled threats as a foundational shift in how we approach security. Public-private coordination has to get past the lip service stage, because joint cyber defense capabilities are not yet mature. The industry takes the threat seriously but can’t move fast enough, and the defender is always at a disadvantage.
Converge Strategies helps keep the lights on when bad things happen. Listen to the full episode on Latitude Media.
Click to ListenWe have to treat this as a foundational shift in how we approach security. There has to be a lot more intentionality about how we do it. There also needs to be much better public-private coordination when we talk about the ways in which the government is able to specifically support utilities and what they’re doing from a cyber defense standpoint. — Jonathon Monken, Converge Strategies on Latitude Media’s Open Circuit