Crawford Alumni Impact Award 2025: Winning Project

The following project has received Natalie and Robert Crawford Alumni Impact Award support.

Protecting Critical Infrastructure

Design by RAND with images by peshkov/Getty Images and Andreas Gruhl, Anoo, and WS Films/Adobe Stock

What happens when the United States mobilizes forces against an adversary that can use tools that affect the U.S. homeland, therefore incapacitating the country's ability to mobilize and disrupting civilian lives? This question motivated RAND's Inverted Rook wargame series and the publication of Defending the United States Against Critical Infrastructure Attacks, which explore threats to U.S. critical infrastructure and cascading hazards.

With Alumni Impact Award funding, Heather Williams and team will create an original video—aimed at emergency managers and decisionmakers, and the general public—that dramatizes the effects of an adversarial attack on the United States. The video will help emergency managers recognize the need for planning and coordination for scenarios intended to constrain decisionmaking or impose costs on the civilian population, alongside the types of hazards they already know from experience, like the recent Hurricane Helene and the Eaton and Palisades fires. The general population, especially public sector utility providers and other critical infrastructure owners, can be inspired to advance preparedness now.

The funding will also enable the team's continued outreach efforts, including media engagement, briefings, and demonstrations of the Inverted Rook game concepts to spread awareness of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities and raise the profile of RAND's growing portfolio of work on homeland defense topics.