In March, Iranian strikes damaged Amazon Web Services data centers and infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, disrupting cloud operations and knocking out power and connectivity at the sites. Reuters reported the damage contributed to service disruptions and a prolonged recovery. The following month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps publicly claimed it had deliberately targeted an Amazon cloud-computing facility in Bahrain.
That claim changes the picture. This wasn’t commercial property caught in a wider fight — Iran named American commercial computing infrastructure as a target. Writer Kate Monroe, in a Fox News opinion piece, argues the episode exposes a gap in how Washington defines national defense, and that Congress needs to close it before an adversary does real damage.
Her point is straightforward: American power now runs through data centers, cloud systems and telecom networks that are privately owned, often sit outside U.S. borders, and don’t fit the old map-based definition of territory to be defended. The military leans on commercial cloud computing. Banks, hospitals, logistics firms and energy providers all depend on the same interconnected systems. Artificial intelligence — increasingly central to both the economy and national defense — runs on enormous computing capacity housed in facilities like the ones Iran just struck.
Federal law already defines critical infrastructure broadly enough to cover physical or virtual systems whose destruction could damage national security, economic security, or public health and safety. What’s missing, Monroe writes, is a policy response sized to match.
A Narrow Designation, Not a Blank Check
Her proposed fix: Congress should create a designation for a small number of exceptionally important American-owned or American-controlled digital facilities — data centers tied to military operations, financial markets, government systems, or strategically significant AI capacity. Companies seeking the designation would have to meet strict requirements on ownership, cybersecurity, physical security, supply-chain integrity and cooperation with U.S. national-security agencies.
She’s explicit that this shouldn’t turn every server farm into a national-security site or hand private firms unconditional government protection. The designation wouldn’t make a facility in Bahrain sovereign U.S. territory either. What it would do is put adversaries on notice that attacking certain infrastructure carries defined consequences — sanctions, asset freezes, diplomatic measures, defensive cyber operations, or other responses Congress authorizes, depending on attribution.
The goal isn’t automatic military escalation over every incident. It’s deterrence: making an attack costly enough that an adversary decides against it.
The AI Stakes
President Trump’s June 2026 National Security Presidential Memorandum on artificial intelligence directed the national-security apparatus to accelerate AI adoption and deepen partnerships with private industry. Monroe argues that push raises the urgency of the infrastructure question — an adversary doesn’t need to touch an AI system directly. It can hit the data center, cut the power supplying it, compromise the connecting communications network, or go after the supply chain behind it. Build national advantage on AI without securing what it runs on, and the advantage becomes a liability.
She points to a pattern already in motion: Russia has used cyberattacks and infrastructure strikes as tools of state power; China has invested heavily in cyber capability while studying American dependence on interconnected systems; Iran has shown it will use cyber and asymmetric tools against U.S. interests. None of that requires hitting a military base.
Monroe’s call to Congress is to build a framework identifying which digital infrastructure is important enough that destroying it would trigger a real U.S. response — then have the administration work with allies on reciprocal protections for similar facilities overseas. Companies running designated sites would, in turn, be held to high security and resilience standards.
Her underlying argument: the U.S. still has borders, bases, ships and aircraft worth defending, but national defense now also means the servers and networks those traditional assets depend on — and Washington’s strategy hasn’t caught up to that fact.
