By Kenneth A. Stewart

NPS Department of Operations Research Professor David Alderson addresses students and faculty during a scheduled Defense Energy Seminar in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Auditorium, April 17. Alderson is an expert in the field of critical infrastructure defense, a focal point of his research here on campus.

"NPS has a unique perspective and capability. We have been studying infrastructure defense for decades," Alderson said.

"We cannot stop every possible attack and we cannot stop Mother Nature either, so what can we do?" asked Alderson. "We can focus on the resilience of the system as a whole … how assets work together to function even in the presence of disruptive events."

To this end, Alderson works with his students utilizing game theory to anticipate possible threats and to devise methods of hardening potential targets before adversaries, or the elements, are able to exploit weaknesses to critical infrastructure.

"We have conducted over 150 red-team analyses to plan for attacks against [U.S.] infrastructure," said Alderson. "We invoke a game theory construct where the players choose how to attack or defend a system."

Alderson is head of NPS' Center for Infrastructure Defense where he leads a group dedicated to improving the operational resilience of critical energy infrastructure in order to protect them from either deliberate threats or non-deliberate hazards.