Strengthening America's Digital Backbone

Strengthening America’s Digital Backbone makes the case that the United States has reached a moment that calls for a deliberate cybersecurity reset. Co-authored with Robert Mayer and Brianna Bace, the piece argues that the networks underpinning the nation’s economy and security have grown faster than the collaborative defenses meant to protect them, leaving a widening gap that adversaries are actively probing.

The authors center the public-private partnership as the mechanism most capable of closing that gap. They contend that neither government mandates nor private initiative alone can secure infrastructure that is overwhelmingly privately owned yet nationally critical, and that trust, shared visibility, and coordinated response must be rebuilt intentionally rather than assumed.

The article surveys the pressures forcing the issue: nation-state pre-positioning inside communications and energy systems, the accelerating role of artificial intelligence on both offense and defense, and supply-chain dependencies that concentrate risk. It frames these not as separate problems but as facets of a single strategic challenge to the digital backbone.

It concludes with a call to recommit to the partnerships, information-sharing structures, and sustained investment that defended critical infrastructure in earlier eras, adapted to the scale and speed of current threats. The piece was published by a national broadband industry association and informed subsequent conference presentations on the same theme.