Testimony of Chuck DeVore
Senior Fellow, Chief National Initiatives Officer
Texas Public Policy Foundation
Chairman, members of the committee: thank you for the opportunity to testify. Texas’s electric grid, energy facilities, water systems, ports, and other critical infrastructure underpin our economy and national security. Disruptions cascade fast—as Winter Storm Uri and Gulf hurricanes showed. Federal responsibility is primary for many threats, yet civil defense has been deprioritized for decades. Texas must lead where it can.
We face three broad threat categories: natural disasters (hurricanes, extreme solar storms that could damage high-voltage transformers), great-power conflict—most likely a Taiwan contingency involving the People’s Republic of China—and terrorism, both jihadist and domestic.
This committee is already aware of the threat posed by natural disasters—with the exception that the threat from extreme solar storms is likely still underappreciated.
As for terrorism, terrorist attacks likely won’t result in greater disruptions than that caused by natural disasters as terrorists have difficulty in preparing to generate large-scale effects without detection.
Great-power conflict presents an entirely different challenge. China has already pre-positioned cyber access via groups such as Volt Typhoon in U.S. communications, energy, transportation, and water sectors, using “living-off-the-land” techniques for potential wartime disruption. Much of this will likely be aided by the presence of trojan horse circuits or software already present on devices or components manufactured in China. Physical sabotage by covert teams or proxies is also a realistic risk, alongside the demonstrated use of drones for infrastructure attacks seen in recent conflicts. Even strategically significant drone attacks originating from Mexican territory are a distinct possibility. Governor Abbott’s 2024 executive order and the creation of the Texas Advisory Committee on Geopolitical Conflict show we are beginning to take these seriously.
Prevention through expanded intelligence fusion, monitoring of foreign investments and land near sensitive sites, physical and cyber surveillance of key nodes, and aggressive detection of potential sabotage teams is essential. We should strengthen information sharing with federal partners while asserting state priorities, and treat adversary-linked operatives inside Texas with urgency—identify them and roll them up before they act or before they can conduct follow on attacks.
However, the hard reality is this: there is little likelihood that Texas, or even the federal government acting alone, can fully prevent or mitigate a large-scale kinetic attack on the power grid and related infrastructure. Adversaries operating below the threshold of open war—what China calls unrestricted warfare and what we call the gray zone—already exploit gaps in surveillance, influence, cyber access, and physical reconnaissance. As recent congressional testimony has underscored, the United States remains ill-prepared at both federal and state/local levels for these persistent, overlapping activities by China, Russia, and others. A determined campaign using drones, sabotage teams, or coordinated cyber-physical means could still succeed in creating widespread, prolonged outages.
Therefore, the practical priority must shift heavily toward hardening where cost-effective, and above all toward rapid recovery. That means strategic stockpiles of long-lead-time critical components—especially large power transformers—managed for fast deployment, possibly through TDEM or the National Guard in partnership with utilities. It means expanded medical and other essential stockpiles for key workforces. It means redundancy via distributed generation and microgrids, pre-positioned recovery equipment for water systems, and regular full-scale exercises that simulate combined natural disasters plus adversarial attacks. Incentives or requirements for risk-based physical and cyber hardening (network segmentation, drone detection, geomagnetic disturbances (GMD) protections where justified) should accompany these efforts.
Texas can also strengthen deterrence by clarifying and enhancing penalties for weaponized or payload-carrying drones used against critical infrastructure, and by ensuring state law works in concert with federal statutes that already authorize severe punishment—including life imprisonment or, in wartime contexts under military commissions, potentially the death penalty—for sabotage of national-defense utilities or energy facilities.
In short: expand intelligence and aggressively disrupt foreign sabotage networks operating in Texas. Harden what we reasonably can. But plan, train, stockpile spares, and build muscle memory for rapid restoration, because a major kinetic or hybrid attack is a realistic possibility we cannot fully prevent. By doing so, Texas protects its people and economy regardless of the threat vector.
I’d be honored to answer any questions from the committee.
