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The grid is already back up from those attacks. There were a lot of predictions of total grid collapse last winter when they started striking actual plants and the winter before when they were hitting distribution hard. I think Ukraine has a pretty good handle on mitigation and routing at this point. I would liken it to the huge allied bombing campaigns in WW2 that were nowhere near as effective as assumed because the germans were pretty good at rebuilding quickly and making do, sure it had an impact, but it was also a LOT more devastating than what the Russians are doing, from a men and material standpoint if the west didn't have such an incredible 100 to 1 advantage on that front then it wouldn't have been cost effective. I wonder if the Russian strikes are cost effective? They wouldn't be at American smart bomb prices, but they could be at Russian smart bomb prices.
I would temper optimism on the power grid comparison. One of the many reasons that the huge allied bombing campaigns were ineffective is that they struggled to hit anything important. With precision weapons, that's a lot easier, and some modern power equipment items are much, much, much harder to rebuild than others.
I might be softly optimistic on resilience- people can put up with a lot, including winter outages- but the issue to fear isn't 'all of Ukraine loses power and can't work,' but rather 'there's (another) Ukrainian exodus out of Ukraine into Europe' if population centers of scale can keep the heat in winter. Even if no one dies, that would be a long term and probably permanent population loss, and the amount who return is always less than the amount who leaves.
In military utility terms, however, if the Russians don't get that sort of demographic impact, then the strikes are likely wasted. Russia's missile utilization rate is gated by it's production rate, which is small enough that a missile at a power node is a missile not hitting a military objective or high-value target. This is how we got Russia spending naval cruise missiles in a land-attack role in the first year- a total waste of capability.
The reason americans went during the daytime despite much higher bomber losses was to use a new technique made possible by a targeting scope. So there was some real targeting and hitting what they targeted by the american bomber groups. The germans just built it back and often had the factory operating at reduced capacity the very next day.
Yes, the Americans improved targeting to 50%- pathetic by todays standards.
Amazing by 1943 standards!
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