曼哈顿，2020年4月6日，从新泽西州威霍肯看去。美国COVID-19死亡人数现已超过9000人。肯纳·贝坦库尔/盖蒂图像公司
联邦应急管理局上周取消了全国应急演习——考虑到冠状病毒大流行，这一决定可能是不可避免的，但它凸显了真正做好准备的机会已经错过。
“已经举行的准备活动帮助我们的国家变得更有弹性，”国土安全部在给应急管理人员的内部邮件中坚持说，从去年开始的演习将被取消。联邦应急管理局通知9个州和全国50多个政府组织、军事指挥部和情报机构，2020年国家级演习(NLE)的剩余部分将不会举行，这是一系列国内演习，计划在5月的第二周结束。
“很明显，联邦应急管理局和政府的其他部门正忙于处理现实世界，”一位前北方司令部指挥官说。但是这位高级官员(他没有公开发言的许可，并要求匿名)哀叹NLE 2020暴露了应急管理机构花费时间“打最后一场战争”降低了它的效率
《NLE 2020》关注的是网络安全——不仅仅是总体的网络安全，还有俄罗斯政府的攻击，战争游戏玩家把这种攻击变得如此极端，以至于它构成了对国家的攻击，激起了军事反应，甚至引发了使用核武器的思考。这一情景把应急反应变成了一场杂耍。
“想知道为什么一次又一次，应急计划者似乎比每一场天灾人祸落后一步？”高级军官说。“这是因为这些所谓的全国性练习缩短了基础知识，有利于更性感的主题，这些主题并非巧合地让高级决策者参与进来。”
随着冠状病毒的增长而进行的演习与大流行无关。这可能是不可避免的。但是，这位高级官员说，设计NLE 2020的政府规划者试图做得太多，迷失在各种热门场景和不太可能的突发事件中。
2020年国家级演习(每两年举行一次)始于去年11月，当时在全国各地的战争游戏中心，一场“基于对手的”网络攻击开始探查美国的电力基础设施。起初，模拟情报报告称黑客是“海外的”和“非国家的”但随后，模拟网络司令部和情报机构一致认为，来自克里姆林宫的俄罗斯国家黑客正在攻击美国。
对NLE 2020和差不多20多种其他战争游戏的描述都是围绕着相同的场景设计的，这些描述来自于泄露给新闻周刊。北方司令部指挥官提供了机密文件。
NLE 2020的文件包括由控制单元(称为“白单元”)发出的模拟信息流量，它提供一些脚本化的情报和字面上的“假消息”来挑战计划者和决策者。一个长达400多页的复杂场景描述了俄罗斯袭击是如何开始和升级的，地方一级的电厂运营商呼吁联邦官员帮助保护他们的公用事业。NLE 2020设想了一个新的场景，不同于俄国和其他国家已经进行的真实世界的探索。在这场战争游戏中，对电力生产本身——而不是配电设施——的广泛攻击导致了灾难性的过载，然后整个北美电网失灵。
NLE 2020的电力部分被称为二进制大停电，是它自己在更大的战争游戏中的子练习。网络攻击是国土安全部文件所说的一系列事件的核心，这些事件“将导致国内国家安全紧急状况，对多个关键基础设施部门产生重大影响。”
这些部门中的每一个部门，以及演习作者们设想的所有事件，都将在一个由20个联邦、州和军事演习组成的环环相扣的集合中进行，大大小小，这些演习计划在7个月内同时进行。当联邦应急管理局在3月29日决定关闭整个游戏时，这20个游戏中的许多已经在进行中或者已经完成。一切都将在5月中旬的“高级官员演习”日达到高潮，届时白宫官员和内阁成员将齐聚一堂，讨论最棘手的问题，从DC撤离到美国是否应该对俄罗斯进行报复。
在本应上演的“国家安全紧急事件”的机密场景下，俄罗斯政府对新英格兰和内华达州发电厂的网络攻击导致了“灾难性停电”(CPO)，其连锁效应像病毒一样在全国蔓延并蔓延至加拿大。在这场游戏中，五个新英格兰州的电网完全瘫痪——在联邦应急管理局第一区，包括康涅狄格州、缅因州、马萨诸塞州、罗德岛州和佛蒙特州，而在西部——在亚利桑那州、加利福尼亚州和内华达州的联邦应急管理局第九区——官员们争相跟上这种迅速蔓延的蠕虫。
根据二元停电计划文件，在迅速蔓延的停电后的24小时内，全国的供水开始受到影响。没有备用发电机的抽水站——或者没有工作的抽水站——进一步失灵，在全国范围内，水务部门的表现下降到40%。随着废水开始回流到净水系统中，高层建筑受到的冲击尤其严重，几乎一半的美国城市认为水不是百分之百安全的。这个场景被认为是这个国家有史以来最大的电力灾难。根据这种情况，各州请求联邦援助，国民警卫队出动，华盛顿重新启动应急计划，规划者扮演市长、州长，甚至内阁官员，总统努力安抚全国。
NLE 2020简报和规划文件称之为复杂的、基于对手的多维攻击，其目的是吸引整个社区的参与者:各级政府、私营部门、非政府组织和社区团体。但是，随着全面的“游戏”处理停电造成的迅速升级的灾难，在现实世界中，冠状病毒也开始传播。
这位北方司令部的高级官员说，在某些方面，NLE 2020确实为现实世界做了准备。两年的周期以单一事件告终，无论所涉及的情景如何，这迫使规划者不得不应对跨辖区应急管理的复杂性和灾难的到来。他说，让NLE 2020如此令人沮丧的是，演习设计者没有使用“二进制大停电”的场景来提供一个看似合理的火花来建立合作，并深入探究在真正的灾难中需要做什么的无聊细节，而是选择将俄罗斯的部分升级，将应急管理演习变成战争场景。
根据这些文件，一旦俄罗斯的攻击被“归因”，民事机构也加入进来，接受华盛顿需要控制，“国家反应”——即模拟白宫、五角大楼和美国政府的新网络战局——就从应急管理转向类似冷战的情景。
这些文件还准确地揭示了一系列的准备工作是如何在公众的视野中进行的，而在幕后，另一系列更为不祥和秘密的讨论又是如何发生的。例如，为州和地方政府准备的非机密文件和简报平淡地说，NLE 2020“包括一个基于大规模杀伤性武器的威胁的选项，以及执行强调权力下放的连续性计划。”但是为顶级政府战争玩家准备的机密简报提出了一个更广泛的大规模杀伤性武器组成部分，以及联邦政府应对的挑战内乱为了撤离华盛顿，为了保护政府的连续性，甚至为了实施戒严法。
这种分裂在冠状病毒反应中很明显。特朗普政府和五角大楼公开表示，他们只是对事件作出回应，对新闻报道不予理会，包括那些新闻周刊,关于这些应急计划是“胡说八道”
国防部长马克·埃斯珀说3月24日，在回应冠状病毒时，“没有任何关于戒严令的讨论”。“没有任何关于美国大规模隔离的言论，也没有任何其他无稽之谈。”
然而，所有这些问题——内乱、旅行限制、连续性甚至戒严法——都包含在NLE 2020的决策包中。随着停电扩大到每个州和魁北克，分类场景不仅假设了对供水的影响，还假设了社会的全面崩溃。整个医疗保健系统崩溃了:医院备用电源耗尽，病人出院，需要冷藏的药物过期，透析等程序停止，死亡人数激增。根据这些文件，“内乱”在全国范围内普遍存在，军事指挥官被请来执行隔离和帮助镇压暴力——但也是为了在文官政府崩溃的地方建立政府。
根据机密文件，到NLE 2020场景的第二周结束时，公共广播停止，互联网瘫痪，人们不再能给手机充电。随着大多数公众与通讯的中断，混乱随之而来。即使有汽油的加油站也不能再加油了，运输网络也停止了运转。由于除了水井没有水，公共卫生变成了大规模感染和疾病的流行病。食品生产停止，所有关键的主食消失，农民不得不宰杀牲畜来拯救健康。文件称，随着死亡率攀升，内乱在每个州都变得普遍。那只是第二周。
在通信和互联网、电力生产和分配、公共卫生、其他关键基础设施和交通等各个领域，我们应该做些什么？这是为了向联邦政府和九个州的数千名参与者发出挑战。这些子元素中的每一个都有自己的在NLE 2020伞下进行的练习。他们被称为网络黎明、网络守卫、网络美国佬、网络风暴、自由蚀、网格索引、RADICS 7、终极守护者、热情哨兵、警惕盾牌和充满活力的回应。
这是一个由民事机构演习和军事战争游戏组成的大杂烩，所有这些都基于同一个二进制大停电场景和NLE 2020的所有部分，正如文件所言:“相关威胁的不同阶段”。
这些规模较小的游戏都是为了吸引不同的经济部门、不同的机构和不同的主题。对于2020年NLE奥运会，到上个月整体演习取消时，许多比赛已经结束或正在进行。这些游戏包括《清晰之路》、《深红色传染病》、《权力游戏》、《震怒》和《弹性网格》。
当所有这些演习正在进行或准备进行的时候，在最高机密上方的分隔圈里，至少有另外三个演习，维塔尔弓箭手、青铜羊和鹰地平线同时进行，每个演习都涉及一些秘密的政府准备，包括使用特种作战部队保护华盛顿的领导和与平民的军事对抗。
NLE 2020的高潮是鹰地平线，计划在5月14-15日举行。在这一分类工作中，政府和高级决策的连续性是重点。白宫机密材料显示，总统乘坐海军陆战队的直升机撤离华盛顿，最终登上了国家空降作战中心，在那里他与他的高级军事顾问进行了电话会议，让核力量进入戒备状态，并决定如何对抗俄罗斯。
这些都不是猜测；没有什么是国防部长斯珀认为是“胡说八道”的这些都是真正的演习，真实的场景和巨大的国土安全和应急反应机构的真实准备，由从联邦应急管理局到司法部的每个机构的政府官员撰写。
NLE 2020的构建方式，不仅仅是两个游戏同时进行，一个是民间政府的非机密游戏，另一个是军方和秘密机构的机密游戏。在这些大型战争游戏中也有等级之分。
“在国家安全团体中，有一个校队和一个初级校队，”北方司令部司令说，“这与等级和情节的严重性有关。”他说，在大学里，其他一切都被忽略了，什么是重要的定义取决于它的高度分类，而不是它的可能性。" NLE 2020在哪里结束？"高级军官说。“问题是我们对俄罗斯的报复有多有效，总统是否会下令发动网络攻击或核打击。
“这条路让那些负责美国应急管理的人想到除了呼吸机和面罩以外的一切。”
EXCLUSIVE: HOW FEMA MISSED THE CHANCE TO BE BETTER PREPARED FOR THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
Manhattan on April 6, 2020 as seen from Weehawken, New Jersey. The U.S. COVID-19 death toll has now surpassed 9,000.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency canceled its national preparedness drill last week—a decision that was probably unavoidable, given the coronavirus pandemic, but one that highlights the missed opportunities to truly prepare.
"The preparedness events that have already been held have helped make our nation more resilient," the Department of Homeland Security insisted in its internal email to emergency managers, saying that the drills, which began last year, would be canceled. FEMA informed nine states and over 50 government organizations, military commands and intelligence agencies around the country that the remainder of National Level Exercise (NLE) 2020, a series of domestic exercises planned to culminate in the second week of May, would not take place.
"Obviously FEMA and the rest of the government is seized with dealing with the real world," says a former NORTHCOM commander. But that senior officer (who lacked permission to speak on the record and requested anonymity) laments that NLE 2020 exposes how much the emergency management apparatus diminishes its effectiveness by spending time "fighting the last war."
NLE 2020 focused on cybersecurity—and not just cybersecurity in general, but a Russian government attack that the war gamers made so extreme that it constituted an attack on the nation, provoking military responses and even contemplation of the use of nuclear weapons. The scenario relegated emergency response to a sideshow.
"Want to understand why, time and again, emergency planners seem to be one step behind every natural and man-made disaster?" the senior officer says. "It's because these so-called national exercises shortchange the basics in favor of the sexier subjects, ones that not coincidentally get senior decision-makers to participate."
The exercise taking place as coronavirus grew had nothing to do with a pandemic. That may have been unavoidable. But, the senior officer says, the government planners who designed NLE 2020 tried to do too much, getting lost in flurry of topical scenarios and unlikely contingencies.
National Level Exercise 2020 (NLEs are held every two years) began last November when in war gaming centers across the country, an "adversary-based" cyberattack started to probe the electrical power infrastructure of the United States. At first, mock intelligence reports said that the hackers were "overseas-based" and "non-state." But then the mock Cyber Command and intelligence agencies agreed that Russian state hackers, directed from the Kremlin, were attacking America.
This description of NLE 2020 and almost two dozen other war games designed around the same scenario come from a sheaf of classified and unclassified plans leaked to Newsweek. The NORTHCOM commander supplied the classified documents.
The NLE 2020 documents include simulated message traffic doled out by the control cell—called the White Cell—who provide scripted bits of intelligence and literally "fake news" to challenge planners and decision-makers. An elaborate scenario, over 400 pages long, describes how the Russian attacks started and escalated, with power plant operators at the local level calling on federal officials to help to protect their utilities. NLE 2020 posited a new scenario, different from the real world probes that Russia and other countries have undertaken. For this war game, a broad attack on electrical power production itself—not distribution facilities—led to a catastrophic overloading and then failure of the entire North American electrical grid.
This electrical-power portion of NLE 2020 is called Binary Blackout and is its own sub-exercise within the larger war game. The cyber attack is at the centerpiece of what the Department of Homeland Security documents say is a set of events that "will lead to a domestic national security emergency with significant impacts on multiple critical infrastructure sectors."
Each of these sectors, and all of the events dreamed up by the exercise authors, then play out in an interlocking set of 20 federal, state and military drills, large and small, that were scheduled to take place simultaneously over a period of seven months. By the time FEMA made the March 29th decision to shut down the whole game, many of these 20 games were already underway or had been completed. Everything was to have culminated in a "Senior Official Exercise" day in mid-May where White House officials and Cabinet members would be gathered to grapple with the most difficult questions, from the evacuation of Washington DC to whether the United States should retaliate against Russia.
Under the classified scenario for the "national security emergency" that was to have played out, the Russian government cyberattack on electrical power plants in New England and Nevada results in a "Catastrophic Power Outage (CPO)" with cascading effects that spread like a virus throughout the country and into Canada. In the game, electrical power grids failed completely in five New England states—in FEMA Region I, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont, while in the West—in FEMA Region IX in Arizona, California, and Nevada—officials scrambled to keep up with the rapidly spreading worm.
According to the Binary Blackout planning documents, within 24 hours of the quickly-spreading blackout, the nation's water supply started to be affected. Pumping stations without back-up generators—or ones that didn't work—further failed, and across the country, water sector performance dropped to as low as 40 percent. High-rise buildings were particularly hit and water was not deemed to be 100 percent safe in almost half of U.S. cities as wastewater began to back up into clean-water systems. The scenario was written to be the largest electrical power catastrophe to ever hit the country. According to the scenario, states requested federal assistance, National Guard units were called out, Washington dusted off its contingency plans and planners playing mayors and governors and even Cabinet officials and the president worked to calm the nation.
NLE 2020 briefings and planning documents call it a complex, adversary-based multidimensional attack that was constructed intentionally to pull in participants from the whole community: all levels of government, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations and community groups. But as full-scale "play" dealt with the rapidly escalating disaster created by a power blackout, in the real world, the coronavirus also started to spread.
In some ways, the senior NORTHCOM officer says, NLE 2020 did provide preparation for the real world. The two-year cycle that culminates in a single event, regardless of the scenario involved, does force planners to grapple with the complications of cross-jurisdictional emergency management and the advent of a catastrophe. What makes the NLE 2020 so frustrating, he says, is that rather than use the Binary Blackout scenario to provide a plausible spark to build cooperation and drill down into the boring details of what needs to be done in a true disaster, the exercise designers instead chose to escalate the Russian component to turn an emergency management drill into a warfare scenario.
According to the documents, once the Russian attack was "attributed" and the civil agencies were on board, accepting that Washington needed to take control, the "national response"—that is, the mock White House, Pentagon and the new cyber warfare bureaus of the American government— wandered away from emergency management into Cold War-like scenarios.
The papers also reveal precisely how there can be one set of preparations going on in the public eye while behind the scenes, another more ominous and secret set of deliberations takes place. For instance, the unclassified papers and briefings intended for state and local governments blandly say that NLE 2020 "includes an option for a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) based threat and the execution of continuity plans with an emphasis on devolution." But the classified briefings prepared for the top government war gamers posit a far more extensive WMD component, as well as the challenges of the federal government responding to civil disturbances, for evacuating Washington, for protecting continuity of government and even imposing martial law.
This split is evident in the coronavirus response. Publicly the Trump administration and the Pentagon say they are merely responding to events, dismissing news stories, including those in Newsweek, about plans for these very contingences as "nonsense."
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on March 24th that "there has been no talk whatsoever of martial law" in responding to coronavirus. "There has been no talk whatsoever of mass quarantines of the United States or any of that other nonsense that is out there."
And yet all of these questions—civil unrest, restrictions on travel, continuity and even martial law —are included in the NLE 2020 decision packets. As the blackout extends into every state and Quebec, the classified scenario posits not just impact on water supply, but a general breakdown of society. The entire health care system collapses: hospitals run out of back-up power, patients are discharged, medications that require refrigeration expire, procedures like dialysis cease, deaths soar. "Civil unrest" is widespread throughout the country, according to the documents, and military commanders are brought in both to enforce quarantines and help suppress violence—but also to establish government in places where civil authority breaks down.
By the end of week two of the NLE 2020 scenario, according to classified documents, public broadcast ceases, the internet goes down, and people are no longer able to charge their cellphones. With most of the public cut off from communications, chaos ensues. Even gas stations that have gasoline can't pump it anymore and the transportation grid grinds to a halt. With no water available except from wells, public hygiene descends into an epidemic of mass infections and disease. The production of foodstuffs ceases, all key staples disappear, farmers have to slaughter their livestock to save the healthy. As the mortality rate climbs, the documents say, civil unrest becomes widespread in every state. And that's only week two.
What to do in each of these sectors—with regard to communications and the internet, with electrical power production and distribution, with public health, with other critical infrastructure utilities and with transportation—is scripted to challenge the thousands of participants throughout the federal government and nine states. Each of these sub-elements has its own exercise that takes place under the NLE 2020 umbrella. They are called Cyber Dawn, Cyber Guard, Cyber Yankee, Cyber Storm, Liberty Eclipse, GridEx, RADICS 7, Ultimate Guardian, Ardent Sentry, Vigilant Shield and Vibrant Response.
It is a smorgasbord of civil agency exercises and military war games all based on the same Binary Blackout scenario and all part of NLE 2020: "distinct phases of a connected threat," as the documents say.
Each of these smaller-scale games is intended to engage a different sector of the economy, different agencies and different themes. For NLE 2020, many of these games had already concluded or were ongoing by last month, when the overall exercise was called off. These included games called Clear Path, Crimson Contagion, Power Play, Shaken Fury and Resilient Grid.
And while all of these exercises were taking place or were getting ready to take the stage, in compartmentalized circles above Top Secret, at least three other exercises, Vital Archer, Bronze Ram and Eagle Horizon were running simultaneously, each involving some secret government preparation, including the use of special operations forces to protect the Washington leadership and military confrontations with the civilian population.
The culmination of NLE 2020 was Eagle Horizon, planned for May 14-15. In this classified exercise, continuity of government and senior decision-making was the focus. The classified White Cell materials show the president evacuating out of Washington on a Marine Corps helicopter, eventually boarding the National Airborne Operations Center where he tele-conferences with his top military advisers, placing nuclear forces on alert and deciding how to confront Russia.
None of this is speculation; none is what Secretary of Defense Esper dismisses as "nonsense." These are all real exercises, real scenarios and real preparations of the gigantic homeland security and emergency response apparatus, written by government officials from every agency from FEMA to the Department of Justice.
The way NLE 2020 was structured, there weren't just two games occurring side-by-side, one unclassified for the civil governments and the other classified for the military and the secret agencies. There's also a pecking order in these large war games.
"There is a varsity and a junior varsity in the national security community," the NORTHCOM commander says, "and it has to do with levels of classification and the gravity of the scenario." Where the varsity takes the field, he says, everything else get shunted aside, the definition of what is important shaped by how highly classified it is, more than by how likely it is. "Where does NLE 2020 end?" the senior officer says. "It's on the question of how effective our retaliation is against Russia, and whether the president will order a cyber or a nuclear strike.
"This is the road that leads those in charge of U.S. emergency management to think of everything except for ventilators and face masks."
