The reason why the Intelligence Community freaked out is because this is exactly the kind of small-scale test they'd do to test a possible attack pattern. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/27/military-style-raid-on-...

The people spooked here are spooks. And that should be telling for those of us on the outside. It's an attack scenario no one had planned for.

I would highly recommend this article by Michael Lewis (and his book) that explores related systemic risk, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy...

> The safety of the electrical grid sat at or near the top of the list of concerns of everyone I spoke with inside the D.O.E. Life in America has become, increasingly, reliant on it. “Food and water has become food and water and electricity,” as one D.O.E. career staffer put it. Back in 2013 there had been an incident in California that got everyone’s attention. Late one night, just southeast of San Jose, at Pacific Gas and Electric’s Metcalf substation, a well-informed sniper, using a .30-caliber rifle, had taken out 17 transformers. Someone had also cut the cables that enabled communication to and from the substation. “They knew exactly what lines to cut,” said Tarak Shah, who studied the incident for the D.O.E. “They knew exactly where to shoot. They knew exactly which manhole covers were relevant—where the communication lines were. These were feeder stations to Apple and Google.” There had been enough backup power in the area that no one noticed the outage, and the incident came and went quickly from the news. But, Shah said, “for us it was a wake-up call.” In 2016 the D.O.E. counted half a million cyber-intrusions into various parts of the U.S. electrical grid. “It’s one thing to put your head in the sand for climate change—it’s like mañana,” says Ali Zaidi, who served in the White House as Obama’s senior adviser on energy policy. “This is here and now. We actually don’t have a transformer reserve. They’re like these million-dollar things. Seventeen transformers getting shot up in California is not like, Oh, we’ll just fix the problem. Our electric-grid assets are growingly vulnerable.”

> In his briefings on the electrical grid MacWilliams made a specific point and a more general one. The specific point was that we don’t actually have a national grid. Our electricity is supplied by a patchwork of not terribly innovative or imaginatively managed regional utilities. The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private-sector mechanism. To that end the D.O.E. had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face. “They all sort of said, ‘But is this really real?’ ” said MacWilliams. “You get them security clearance for a day and tell them about the attacks and all of a sudden you see their eyes go really wide.”

Edit

Personal Interpretation: Someone hired highly trained mercenaries (?) to operate on US soil to test destroying critical infrastructure that led directly to Apple + Google. Large, stationary, expensive infrastructure that is lacking in redundancy.

They knew exactly what targets to hit. It follows that they knew that there was backup capacity in the system. This was a test run. And bullets are cheap.

What if instead of one team for one location, it had been three teams for three locations? Or, four? Five? Six? Could they have successfully crippled the nation? And plunged the stock market?