Opinion Piece Urges Congress to Treat Data Centers as National Security Assets After Iranian Strikes

A new opinion piece published by Fox News is calling on Congress to formally designate certain privately owned digital infrastructure — including data centers and cloud-computing facilities — as critical national security assets, citing recent attacks tied to Iran as evidence that America’s digital backbone has become a wartime target.

The piece, written by Kate Monroe, points to a March incident in which Iranian strikes damaged Amazon Web Services data centers and infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Reuters reported that the damage disrupted cloud infrastructure and contributed to power and connectivity problems, leading to an extended recovery process. In April, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps publicly claimed it had targeted an Amazon cloud-computing facility in Bahrain.

Monroe argues that the April claim is significant because it shows Iran deliberately identifying American commercial computing infrastructure as a military target, rather than the facility simply being caught in unrelated fighting.

The Argument for a New Designation

Monroe’s piece notes that federal law already defines critical infrastructure broadly, covering physical or virtual systems whose destruction could seriously damage national security, the economy, or public health and safety. But she argues that U.S. national-security strategy hasn’t kept pace with how dependent the military, financial institutions, hospitals, communications networks, logistics companies and energy providers have become on interconnected digital systems, including those supporting artificial intelligence.

She proposes that Congress create a narrow designation for exceptionally important American-owned or American-controlled digital infrastructure, with companies required to meet strict standards on ownership, cybersecurity, physical security, supply-chain integrity, redundancy and cooperation with national-security agencies. Facilities that might qualify, according to the piece, include those supporting military operations, financial markets, critical communications, government systems or strategically important AI capabilities.

Importantly, Monroe clarifies that such a designation would not make a facility like a Bahrain data center sovereign American territory. Instead, it would establish a clear policy that attacking designated infrastructure carries consequences — a deterrent rather than a change in legal territory.

Possible Responses and AI Concerns

The piece suggests Congress should lay out a range of potential responses to attacks on such infrastructure, including sanctions, asset freezes, diplomatic measures, defensive cyber operations, and additional measures depending on circumstances and attribution. Monroe stresses the goal isn’t to automatically escalate every attack into military confrontation, but to make the costs of an attack clear enough to discourage adversaries.

The piece also references President Donald Trump’s June 2026 National Security Presidential Memorandum on artificial intelligence, which directed the national-security enterprise to accelerate AI adoption and deepen partnerships with private industry. Monroe warns that as the U.S. leans further into AI for intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, logistics and military planning, the computing infrastructure underpinning those systems becomes a more attractive target — and that without protecting it, a strategic advantage could become a vulnerability.

Monroe names Russia, China and Iran as adversaries that have already shown willingness to use cyber operations or infrastructure attacks against American interests, arguing that modern conflict no longer requires striking a military installation to inflict damage on the United States.