What is Critical Infrastructure?
The Clinton administration seemed the first to recognize the danger to critical infrastructure posed by Al Qaeda and other terrorists of the world. With America’s virtual global military supremacy, US concerns shifted towards the threat to (and vulnerability of) the infrastructure that provides and supports that supremacy. “Rogue states,” and sub-groups such as the ‘new terrorists,’ understood the reality that they could not defeat the U.S. militarily on the battlefield – they would thus take on ‘Goliath’ through asymmetric attacks on its economy and critical infrastructure. U.S. economic and military power are interdependent. The U.S. had already seen the impact of the Oklahoma City bombing of the federal building and knew that it was not immune to such attacks at home by terrorists. In the aftermath of the 1996 terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia on the U.S. military barracks at Khobar towers and the 1998 simultaneous bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Clint
