Recent blackouts underscore the need for increased investment and deployment of well-defined and coordinated overall defense plans. Any investment should consider the long-term impact associated with system adjustments and be preceded by detailed system studies and followed by routine coordination studies and prudent analysis of which investments are most necessary. There is no silver-bullet solution to preventing blackouts, but there are general measures than can and should be taken to minimize impact of disturbances. Since the recent outages were caused by a complex sequence of cascading events, electric utilities, industry regulators, and state and federal legislators must undertake the following steps to determine what happened, understand why it happened, and prevent it from happening again.