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Directly, you don't. You hope that the adversary isn't able to strike hard enough or at enough targets, or is unwilling to go all in on war crimes by destroying
by grues-dinner 2y ago
Directly, you don't. You hope that the adversary isn't able to strike hard enough or at enough targets, or is unwilling to go all in on war crimes by destroying civilian infrastructure. Iraqi and Yugoslavian grids were taken down almost entirely in days in the 90s and they only came back because there was a very careful use of weapons and tactics that didn't completely annihilate the gear. And modern equipment is far, far, far less field-repairable then whatever an average Iraqi substation had installed in 1990.
It's only going to get worse in conflicts where there's willingness to attack infrastructure because energy infrastructure is fixed in place, delicate, physically large and easy to detect and locate and vulnerable to even small drone-sized attacks, let alone missiles. And that's assuming you have to attack it physically at all and not just remotely disable it somehow.
If you have to harden the infrastructure, all you can do really is simplify hugely so you can repair it when attacked (fewer imported Infineon IGBTs, fancy Siemens PLCs, and networked UHVDC switchgear on 2 year lead times) and decentralise to minimise single points of failure and avoid cascading failures. Which is hugely inefficient in physical terms like wasted capacity and losses as well as the human effort required to keep it running, but some places might have some power.
Even then, in the next decades, against a state level adversary who could make and deliver, say, drones that can autonomously recognise and attack anything that looks like a ceramic insulator disk or a solar panel, if you can't threaten grave retaliation, you're back to the good old tutting about war crimes.
- DanielHB 2y agoI fear such civilian attacks are going to become more commonplace over time. It is well hypothesized that should China invade Taiwan, Taiwan would destroy the three gorges dam and completely annihilate a good chunk of China. It is just as much a deterrent as nuclear weapons, probably worse in this specific case. This is why you can't go for the throat of a regime anymore, even if you have overwhelming force. Because if you do then, well, you are already going to jail for war crimes anyway.
- gpderetta 2y ago> if you do then, well, you are already going to jail for war crimes anyway. realistically, only if you lose the war.
- lnenad 2y agoOr you're the USA
- 15155 2y ago> destroy the three gorges dam Through what non-nuclear means would they hypothetically destroy this massive concrete structure?
- grues-dinner 2y agoI don't know, I think that's always been a possibility. Hitting massive civilian infrastructure has always been kind of a MAD thing. And hard to spin as anything other than a war crime - floodplains covered in civilian bodies looks bad. What seems scarier to me is the newer possibility of a huge number of very small remote attacks that utterly devastate the fabric of civilian systems, but none of them individually look like egregious war crimes. With the right PR, they can be defended as "limited" and "surgical" attacks denying "dual-use" infrastructure. Put all the blame for "looking suspicious" onto the locals with advance warning. Solar panels on the roof? Just like a command post. Radio antenna, looks like a communications relay. Fuel tanks? Vehicle pool. You can even give notice of all the strikes, you don't need to bomb them personally, they'll be out of mind without food, water, sewerage, healthcare or heating. For bonus points, then you can blame the defending government for failures of governance when they can't organise, say, waste treatment any more.
- scotty79 2y agoWarcrime becomes increasingly a previous century thing. This century war itself is a crime and to counter it all means are on the table again.
- bluGill 2y agoSubstations wouldn't be hard to protect against drones. Building reinforced concrete bunkers around them is something we know how to do. I'm surprised substation makers aren't offering Ukraine models with armored plates (or maybe they are?), a couple inches of steel is expensive but would stop small drones. The wires themself connecting to the substation are cheap enough to replace. Of course the above all comes at a cost. It is much cheaper to put your substations in open air.
- grues-dinner 2y agoThat's so completely impractical I don't know where to begin. There are hundreds of thousands of substations in a modern country, and more transformers on top of that. And the bigger substations are huge. An urban 275kV substation could easily be 10 acres in size. "Wires" are also not especially cheap or easy to replace either, even at "low" voltages like under 33kV. It's not a few feet of twin and earth and an h-clip. And a couple of inches of steel will absolutely not stop small drones if they're designed from the ground up to be anti-materiel devices. Anduril are hawking these right now complete with their wierdly gleeful videos, and if they're the only ones in the world then short my secondary and call me a slagpile. And that's ignoring weapons anyway in use like those tungsten filled rockets that just shred everything in the area. They'd go right though both sides of your armoured switchgear.