Critical Communications Infrastructure Protection in Era of Constantly Emerging Vulnerabilities and Blended Threats

Essentially, the objective of critical infrastructure protection is to mitigate risk by eliminating or reducing the related threats, vulnerabilities and consequences while increasing the complex network resilience in case of failure. Examining and departing largely from this inherent risk based environment approach; this research paper is expanding on and asking a series of questions about an alternative strategy to contain risk and render its consequences minimal or nonexistent on the communications infrastructure covering or encompassing Landlines, Wireless/Cell and Satellite networks. This paper will attempt to show that such an approach is possible with a new deployment framework or strategy leveraging the existing communications network components and technologies. Moreover, this research attempts to show that the enhanced safety, security, resilience and survivability of such system reside in a sea based system supported by ships and submarines which percolates or expands assets horizontally and vertically by interconnecting landlines, wireless/cell and satellite communications networks. The goal of such system is to support and maintain secure and resilient operational capabilities of US communications infrastructure in case of a black swan like event that could potentially degrade, disrupt or destroy the existing infrastructure with its underlying TCP/IP infrastructure. Therefore, this paper suggests that the new network can be implemented and deployed as a “Staged, Modular, Internet, Redeployable, Redundant Network” also known as SMIRRNet.