The United States is preparing to host the world twice in less than a decade. The Summer Olympics in Los Angeles (2028) and the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (2034) will return global attention to American soil in rapid succession. For most, these are sporting milestones. For those who live and work in defense, infrastructure, and critical systems resilience, they are something else entirely.
They are signals.
When the Games arrive, the world does not only measure athletic performance. It studies infrastructure under strain. It watches how logistics, communications, and public trust hold under global attention. It observes whether resilience is embedded or staged. For the United States, this moment is not only about reputation. It is about doctrine: can continuity be proven when adversaries are most incentivized to test it?
Below, we explore why the back-to-back Games represent a crucible for American resilience and how red team/blue team drilling must scale to meet the moment. Three truths guide the argument:
- Secondary towns, such as Ocala, Mint Spring, Jefferson, and others, are proving grounds for resilience.
- Public-private convergence is not a slogan but a doctrine: boots and operators must drill together.
- Resilience: The Olympics must symbolize national resilience, not local performance.
This moment demands more than preparation for the host cities themselves. It calls for a national reflection on where resilience is built, how it is tested, and what message it communicates. The Games are not isolated events; they are global focal points that highlight both strengths and weaknesses. To meet this standard, the United States must think beyond venues and stadiums, and confront resilience as a living doctrine proven through drills, validated across sectors, and carried into every community where disruption could cascade.
Secondary Towns: The Overlooked Crucibles of Resilience
When discussions of resilience reach national stages, attention inevitably gravitates toward major metropolitan centers. Los Angeles and Salt Lake City dominate headlines, just as New York or Washington dominate security planning. Yet resilience is not truly proven in these arenas. It is demonstrated in smaller, overlooked towns, such as Sanford, Florida; Mint Spring, Virginia; Jefferson, Maryland; and Holt Springs, Missouri. These places, which most outside observers never name, are quietly studied by adversaries.
The value of these towns lies in their complexity in miniature. They host regional hospitals, municipal water systems, small airports, distribution hubs, biotech startups, and defense-adjacent contractors. Their systems are as interconnected as those of larger cities, but with thinner margins. A ransomware strike on a county hospital here doesn’t just inconvenience operations; it immediately disrupts emergency care for entire regions. A power outage in these areas spreads more quickly because redundancies are limited. Cascading failures occur at a rapid pace, and recovery resources are limited.
For a police officer or first responder in these towns, drills reveal how quickly local continuity can collapse, whether dispatch can still function if telecom links are severed, whether backup generators hold up under sustained outages, and whether partnerships with nearby counties actually deliver when called. For senior executives studying national resilience, these towns serve as case studies in interdependency under stress. They show in sharp relief whether American systems can absorb disruption at the edges without losing stability at the core.
Adversaries understand this calculus well. They know the world watches Los Angeles during the Games. Still, they also understand that a breach in Lexington, South Carolina, or Ocala, Florida, far from the cameras, carries equal weight as a signal of weakness. If resilience is proven only in host cities, it is not resilience at all; it is performance. True resilience is demonstrated when the small nodes hold as firmly as the large ones.
The crucible of resilience is not in the stadium. It is in the overlooked town, where cascading failure is fastest, and where continuity must be treated as doctrine, not aspiration.
Public–Private Convergence: Boots, Operators, and Shared Continuity
Resilience is not the domain of government alone, nor can it be proven in isolated corporate boardrooms. Continuity in contested conditions demands true public–private convergence: police officers in uniform standing beside corporate operators in data centers, municipal leaders drilling with private security teams, and local emergency managers coordinating directly with critical companies.
Consider Salt Lake City. On one side are police and fire services, which are trained to respond in real-time to physical incidents. On the other side are companies like Vivint Smart Home, Adobe, and Apple’s regional presence organizations that hold critical access to systems and data relied upon by millions. A ransomware strike, for example, would not respect jurisdictional lines. It would demand immediate cooperation: police managing public order, corporate operators stabilizing networks, and intelligence centers linking both into national reporting streams. If only one side drills, the continuity gap remains.
The same pattern holds in Los Angeles, where global logistics, entertainment, and cloud service providers converge. The Games will magnify attention, but resilience here is not just about headline venues. It’s about whether law enforcement, city command, and private operators can withstand simultaneous disruptions: a port delay, a telecom outage, and a coordinated misinformation campaign targeting the Games. If these entities do not train together, they will stumble apart.
Even in Frederick, Maryland, a town with less global visibility but equal importance, convergence looks different but is no less critical. FITCI’s startups, regional biotech firms, and defense-adjacent contractors rely on trust in local infrastructure. If a disruption occurs, county police and emergency managers must be able to act in concert with these companies. Without that partnership, continuity breaks within hours.
For the officer, convergence drills test whether backup communications work when cell networks fail, or whether city responders can find a common language with private operators under stress. For executives, convergence drills reveal whether investment in resilience yields results when human systems are under pressure.
No blue team is complete without corporate operators. No red team is credible unless it pressures both sectors at once. Convergence is not an aspiration. It is doctrine.
ISACs: The Intelligence Fabric of Resilience
In an era where disruptions cross sectors without warning, no entity, public or private, can operate in isolation. Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) form the intelligence fabric that binds resilience together. They collect, refine, and distribute threat information at the speed required to make resilience actionable.
During a red team/blue team drill, ISACs are not spectators. They are active conduits:
- Delivering real-time indicators of compromise to local defenders, giving police and corporate operators the same situational awareness.
- Sharing telemetry across sectors: so an attempted breach on a financial node is flagged immediately for energy and logistics operators.
- Compressing the intelligence loop so red team actions are not seen as isolated anomalies, but as part of an interconnected adversarial campaign.
For the officer, ISAC participation means local data doesn’t just feed their dispatch terminal, but also national and even international intelligence streams. For the executive, it means corporate risk frameworks are aligned with the same adversarial picture guiding federal agencies.
The Olympics provide the perfect opportunity to test ISACs under maximum stress. If global attention triggers adversarial campaigns, the question is not whether LA or SLC can respond in isolation; rather, it is whether they can collaborate effectively. The question is whether ISAC pipelines can distribute intelligence fast enough to keep both cities and the overlooked towns beyond them aligned in real-time.
If the intelligence fabric tears, resilience collapses, no matter how strong the individual nodes appear. ISACs are not optional; they are the nervous system of resilience.
CCI: Convening Authority and Doctrinal Alignment
Resilience requires more than information. It requires doctrine: the frameworks that dictate how drills are structured, how responses are coordinated, and how lessons are codified. This is the role of the Capitol Cyber Initiative (CCI).
CCI is not merely a forum. It is a convening authority, one that brings together public agencies, private companies, and infrastructure operators under a shared resilience doctrine. Its value is not in creating policy papers, but in structuring simulations, embedding lessons, and ensuring consistency across regions.
For Olympic readiness, CCI’s convening authority is critical. Without it, Los Angeles might drill one way, Salt Lake another, and Spartinsburg not at all. With CCI, the doctrine is unified: adversarial scenarios are designed against the same frameworks, lessons learned are codified into repeatable playbooks, and cross-sector trust is facilitated through shared engagement.
For the officer, CCI’s value lies in clarity: knowing the chain of command, the timing of escalation, and the trusted counterparts in the private sector before an incident occurs. For the executive, CCI’s value is foresight: ensuring that investments in resilience are measured against national doctrine, not isolated corporate benchmarks.
Where ISACs carry intelligence, CCI carries doctrine. Together, they ensure that resilience is not fragmented, but orchestrated.
Proving Resilience: From Contest to Convergence
Resilience cannot be validated through policy papers or tabletop exercises. It must be proven under pressure, in environments where attack and defense collide, adapt, and converge.
That is where The Vermont Group plays a critical role. Positioned outside government mandates and corporate interests, it provides the neutral ground where drills are designed, executed, and validated with rigor. Its presence transforms red–blue contests from staged performances into crucibles, where ransomware, misinformation, and physical disruption converge in layered assaults, and where resilience is measured not by recovery alone, but by endurance under sustained conflict.
Within this crucible, advanced methodologies matter. Simulations must combine cyber intrusions with power disruptions, disinformation bursts, and kinetic stress. They must map interdependencies across energy, finance, healthcare, and logistics, exposing where a single break cascades system-wide. Decision loops must be compressed to a matter of minutes. Red teams must be allowed to pivot unpredictably, escalating as adversaries do. Zero-failure doctrines must be validated not for hours, but for days or weeks.
The final evolution is purple teaming; the structured convergence of red and blue. Here, attack and defense share tactics and countermeasures in real-time, closing gaps as they emerge. It is not a compromise, but a codification, transforming adversarial insight into embedded resilience. In purple, contests become convergence; lessons become doctrine.
Together, these practices represent more than exercises. They are proofs. They shift resilience from theory into reality, from performance into permanence. And they establish the doctrine that the United States must demonstrate, not just in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, but in every crucible town and interdependent system where the strength of the nation is silently tested.
Why This Matters: The United States at the Crucible
If Los Angeles and Salt Lake City hold firm under the world’s gaze but Flagstaff or Leesburg fractures in silence, the adversary will not be deceived. A seamless performance in the stadium cannot mask systemic failure in the overlooked nodes of the nation. In resilience, there are no partial victories. Either the system holds, or the symbol collapses.
Why this matters is not abstract. In practice, it determines whether a county officer in Waynesboro receives the same adversarial indicators as a federal team in Washington, or whether a logistics executive in Ocala can coordinate with public agencies under the same doctrine guiding Los Angeles. When these seams hold, the nation speaks with one voice in times of stress. When they fracture, adversaries hear the silence first.
This is why convergence drills across towns, sectors, and scales matter beyond the Games themselves. They are not rehearsals for the ceremony. They are proofs of doctrine. When public and private stand together, when local and national align, when intelligence flows as freely as logistics, the message radiates outward in every direction.
To allies, it communicates that American resilience can be relied upon, that partnerships are anchored in systems built to endure.
To adversaries, it demonstrates that American continuity cannot be broken, that disruption may wound, but it will not collapse the whole.
To citizens, it affirms that resilience is not performance but guarantees that their safety, trust, and continuity of life are embedded, not improvised.
The Olympics may provide the stage, but the crucible extends far beyond the host cities. It lives in the fabric of every community, every interdependency, every seam of the nation. Resilience is proven everywhere.
Closing Reflection
The Games are not the test. They are the signal.
The real test lies in the crucibles that rarely make headlines: Ocala, Waynesboro, Sioux Falls, and Jefferson. Towns where disruption cascades fastest and recovery is least forgiving. It is here, in overlooked nodes of the national fabric, that the accurate measure of resilience is revealed.
Resilience cannot be episodic. It cannot flicker into existence when the world is watching and fade when the lights dim. It must be continuous, cultural, and doctrinal. It must be reflected in the day-to-day operations of local police, standing beside corporate operators, in ISAC intelligence shared across sectors, in CCI’s convening of doctrine, and in the amplifying rigor of The Vermont Group. When these elements converge, resilience ceases to be performance. It becomes practice.
What endures after the Games is not ceremony or flawless logistics, but continuity under pressure. The ability to hold when adversaries adapt, when systems fail in sequence, when confidence itself is tested. That continuity, proven in places both grand and humble, is what communicates most clearly to allies and adversaries alike.
If resilience holds in the overlooked towns, it holds everywhere. If it falters there, the symbol collapses even if the Games appear seamless. The Olympics may draw the cameras, but the crucible is the nation itself.
The enduring message must be unmistakable: this system is present in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and every community in between.