Electrical production facilities have been considered by the US and its allies as dual use and as such, legitimate targets in their strikes against enemies for quite a long time. Anyone who has watched any US 'shock and awe' campaigns notices the power goes up very, very quickly.
As an American citizen, I'm very glad this wasn't treated as indistinguishable from a nuclear attack. I regret that no one was held accountable for initiating the war, but MAD would have been bad news.
I was and am against those wars, but I am not a pacifist. If a war is a 'just way' and should be fought (there's a whole scholarship on when wars are just, I have a high bar, but it can be met), there will always be targets that are 'dual use' and in that regrettable circumstance in my mind, those would be legitimate targets after a very careful calculus was made to weigh lives lost and saved by destroying them.
Most American military experts assumed the Russians would have started the war with a much more aggressive arial bombardment. It's just kind of how these things are done. I assume them doing this now is Russia paving the way for a more traditional operation to begin when the ground freezes. It's going to be a bloody winter. It's a tragedy.
As an American citizen, I'm very glad this wasn't treated as indistinguishable from a nuclear attack. I regret that no one was held accountable for initiating the war, but MAD would have been bad news.
I was and am against those wars, but I am not a pacifist. If a war is a 'just way' and should be fought (there's a whole scholarship on when wars are just, I have a high bar, but it can be met), there will always be targets that are 'dual use' and in that regrettable circumstance in my mind, those would be legitimate targets after a very careful calculus was made to weigh lives lost and saved by destroying them.
Most American military experts assumed the Russians would have started the war with a much more aggressive arial bombardment. It's just kind of how these things are done. I assume them doing this now is Russia paving the way for a more traditional operation to begin when the ground freezes. It's going to be a bloody winter. It's a tragedy.