A drone flies over power lines. Low-cost drones expose fixed energy infrastructure to surveillance and attack from far beyond the traditional battlefield. (Shutterstock/Below the Sky)

Energy Security in an Age of No Sanctuary

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Low-cost drones and longer-range strike systems are eroding the secure rear. Energy policy must shift from protecting every asset to keeping essential services running through repeated disruption.

For decades, energy security followed a familiar logic. Policy focused on securing fuel supplies and restoring systems after discrete shocks: oil blocked at a chokepoint, gas cut by a supplier, or power interrupted by a storm or cyberattack. Governments diversified supply, held stocks, built spare capacity, and strengthened networks. Beneath that approach sat a quieter assumption: domestic energy infrastructure would remain largely intact.

New technologies are eroding that assumption. Commercial satellite imagery, open-source targeting tools, low-cost drones, and longer-range weapons are changing the economics of attack. The attacker chooses when and where to strike; the defender must cover thousands of fixed sites every day. It is a contest between a selective offense and a permanent defense.

US Air Force doctrine has already absorbed this shift. It states that air bases are no longer sanctuaries regardless of location, while a separate Air Force report warns that ultra-long-range precision weapons will leave “no sanctuary” and expose fixed sites to repeated or continuous strikes. Its Agile Combat Employment doctrine reduces reliance on a small number of large bases by dispersing operations across a wider network of locations. Protection remains essential, but survivability can no longer rest on protection alone. The same is increasingly true for critical energy infrastructure. 

In energy, geographic depth no longer guarantees that infrastructure behind the front will remain untouched. Power plants, substations, refineries, ports, pipelines, storage sites, and control centers share many of the features that make military bases vulnerable. They are fixed, visible, interconnected, and costly to relocate. Ukrainian drones have reached Russian energy facilities thousands of kilometers from the border, while the Iran war has exposed major energy hubs. Distance alone can no longer serve as a security strategy.

The energy equivalent of Agile Combat Employment is not to disperse everything. It is to redesign critical service networks so that no single loss becomes fatal and alternative operating modes can be activated quickly.

The End of Zero-Damage Planning for Critical Infrastructure

Once complete protection is impossible, governments must stop using zero damage as the implicit design standard. Air and cyber........

© The National Interest