(The Epoch Times)—U.S. ports are strategic infrastructure upon which the nation’s economic stability and military readiness depend, yet remain highly exposed to an attack that could ground billions in trade activity or defense operations to a halt. In fact, adversaries have already infiltrated U.S. port infrastructure, and the path forward must be one that adopts “zero trust” principles, experts say.
“Zero trust is a fundamental shift in the way that we view and defend our enterprise and [operational technology] environments,” David Forbes, director of cyber physical defense at management consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton, said at an event on July 31 discussing a report released July 29 by Booz Allen and the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security.
“It changes the way we think about cyber defense, so we are here assuming breach.”
The report, titled “Anchored in Zero Trust: Taking Action to Create Resilient U.S. Port Infrastructure,” outlines the current exposure to risk and offers policy recommendations and operator best practices to secure the ports.
“We know that adversaries are on our networks. They’re in our infrastructure. Volt Typhoon has proven this in a broad range of critical infrastructure sectors, and maritime ports can be and should be at the center of that,” Forbes said.
Ports Exposed
The roughly 360 ports in the United States handle more than 40 percent of goods entering or leaving the country, valued at about $2.1 trillion.
The zero trust approach assumes systems are already breached, building in continuous verification rather than defending systems at the perimeter.
The McCrary Institute–Booz Allen report notes cases in which U.S. ports have already been subject to disruptive cyber activity, including a Volt Typhoon hack on the Port of Houston in 2021.
Just last year, the Port of Seattle was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted baggage handling, check-in kiosks, flight displays, Wi-Fi, and online reservation tools. The report notes that this case illustrates how isolated systems in this incident meant that the impact of the attack was comparatively contained.
Lawmakers have sounded the alarm over the fact that a single Chinese company, Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company (ZPMC), currently dominates the ship-to-shore cranes market, accounting for 80 percent of those used in U.S. ports.
A congressional investigation concluded that some of these cranes had installed unauthorized components, which included cellular modems. Lawmakers have also noted that ZPMC has multiple times requested remote access to the cranes. The company is a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned communications conglomerate with ties to the Chinese military.
A U.S. Coast Guard review of 90 foreign-made cranes found that, although they posed no unique vulnerabilities, the cranes had the same security weaknesses that often plague such technology systems. These networks can often have poor password policies, unpatched systems, or unnecessary connections to other systems.
The Coast Guard already requires owners and operators of Chinese-made ship-to-shore cranes to eliminate crane connections to the internet and take other risk management actions.
The report recommended an approach wherein port operators ensure that systems can run even when disconnected from networks, and be segmented as much as possible, with strict identity security for all user accounts and automated services, clear visibility into all critical data flow, encryption of sensitive information, and active threat analyses.
It also includes more advanced recommendations, such as tabletop exercises to walk through potential attack scenarios. The nonprofit think tank Gold Institute for International Strategy and cyber security firm Neptune SHIELD hosted one such exercise on June 26 and will do so again at an Oct. 6–9 forum.
The cybersecurity of today extends far beyond the digital space. The disclosure of Volt Typhoon, a Chinese communist regime-backed cyber campaign that has infiltrated U.S. critical infrastructure systems and is pre-positioned to cause disruption, showed a significant escalation in Chinese state-sponsored cyber activity from espionage and IP theft to a potential willingness to cause widespread physical damage.
Brad Medairy, executive vice president for National Security and Cyber, said that as the United States becomes a bigger cyber target, there should be a shift in approach to provide deterrence.
“Our national attack surface is continuing to expand, our risk posture continues to get bigger,” Medairy said at the July 31 event. “We should not accept the fact that the PRC is pre-positioning capabilities in our critical infrastructure that could cause us harm. We shouldn’t accept that the PRC is attacking our telecommunication infrastructure, our defense industrial base.”
McCrary Institute Director Frank Cilluffo agreed. “We have been a victim for too long, and we’ve got to get out of that mindset,” he said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
