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Notes -
Zelensky and Trump's arm twisting competition
Ukraine is bombing Russian refineries. Good for them but maybe not so good for the price of diesel and thus for Trump. Trump has been very vocal about how Zelensky needs to stop using the targeting data that the US supplies them. Recently he's stepped up his threats, proclaiming a diesel deal with Russia just a couple months after the Lindsey Graham Memorial Sanctions Bill, and announcing an energy ceasefire that Russia doesn't seem to know about.
Republican congressfolk have been fairly supportive of the Iran conflict but Russia is much more polarizing. Zelensky seems confident we won't see a repeat of the early administration snafu - no need for groveling and thank yous - due to this pressure. On the other hand, another winter without sufficient air defense will prove extremely painful, though we said that last year too.
I don't get why Zelensky doesn't just go easy on the refineries for a few weeks to get some Trump brownie points. It can also get some moral high ground of like "we held the ceasefire but Russia kept attacking" for a renewed massive strike in November or December. I just don't see holding back on energy for a couple weeks making much of a difference for the war effort, the economic shocks will have a delayed effect on putin and the front line, and he has plenty of non-energy targets to hit like datacenters and warehouses.
On another note, I do like how Ukraine is gloves off - many of their attacks on bridges and powerplants and other economic targets would be screeched of as WAR CRIMES if Trump did it. (by the same people who simp for Zelensky of course) I'm sure if Trump really went scorched earth and maximally targeted these types of targets, Iran would actually be brought to its knees, but instead all we get is a bunch of cope strikes on insignificant targets.
The model that most people who are anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine have of Trump's policy is that he wants Ukraine to lose, and ideally to lose quickly*, but US domestic politics means he can't just sell Ukraine out the way Chamberlain and Daladier sold out Czechoslovakia or Nixon sold out South Vietnam.
If Zelensky shares this model, then Ukraine doesn't need Trump brownie points - he needs to retain the support of the marginal Russophobe Republican senator whose potential vote in an impeachment trial is his main leverage against Trump selling him out. And he can do that more easily by fighting hard and well and showing that Ukraine can still win with appropriate support than by making a militarily expensive show of support for a harebrained Trump admin scheme that is unlikely to actually move the pump price of diesel or the midterm vote. "Trump brownie points" only help Ukraine if there is a possibility that they move Trump to a stance of actually helping Ukraine win.
* There are multiple plausible motivations for this on Trump's part, with TDS sufferers focusing on the corrupt and/or treasonous ones, but given that MAGA Twitter is even more pro-Russian than Trump himself, they probably aren't necessary. Trump behaves in the same way regardless of whether Russia has paid him off, he honestly believes that a Russian victory is in the US national interest as understood from a MAGA perspective, or because he thinks a quick Russian victory is the best hope to avoid megadeaths due to a prolonged war.
Attacks on dual-use economic infrastructure like bridges and powerplants are war crimes if the damage to civilians is grossly disproportionate to any potential military advantage gained. This implies that punitive bombing of bridges and powerplants absent a ground war (where to a first approximation there is no direct military advantage and the damage to civilian morale is the whole point) is much more likely to be a war crime than bombing of bridges and powerplants alongside a ground war. If Trump bombed Iranian bridges and powerplants in order to soften them up for an invasion, then it would be (arguably) a criminal war of aggression but not a war crime. Leftists would still be screeching WAR CRIMES because they are stupid like that.
Considering the targets in Russia are hundreds of km behind the front line, they appear to be purely economic targets. The fact that a ground war is or isn't happening on the other side of the country isn't relevant.
But I do think this whole war crime nonsense is just crap and waging economic war is just a normal part of waging war though all of history. It's just another place where anti-americans can throw in a an isolated demand for rigor to impede progress.
I believe in the old school logic of ius in bello - that there are certain destructive practices that armies are likely resort to out of sadism/schadenfreude/righteous anger despite the lack of practical military benefit, and that banning them is a useful precommitmemt that will help us resist our own desire to act out our vices when the opportunity arises.
On that model, punitive bombing of civilian targets is the sort of practice you would want to ban. Bomber Harris said out of one side of his mouth that bombing civilian housing in German cities was part of an "industrial web" attack designed to make the newly-homeless workers less productive. Out of the other side of his mouth, he said a lot of great lines about winds and whirlwinds that implied his real motivation was simply to inflict pain on a deserving target. If we hadn't bombed German civilian housing, the war would have turned out the same way, except for fewer dead British aircrew and fewer dead German civilians.
Bomber Harris can plausibly claim ignorance - it wasn't obvious in 1942 that you couldn't win a war using air attacks on civilian morale. His successors can't. But people keep doing it - see Brett Devereux on the long and undistinguished history of strategic air power.
I thought it was broadly accepted that you can win a war doing civilian strikes. Wasn’t that the point of Sherman’s March to the Sea. A partial reason for nuking Japan. Mongol war theory.
Post 1950-Western doctrine doesn’t seem to work but that’s because we’ve had limits on how savage we could be.
These attacks were only one part of a larger military victory
That feels to me like the same thing as saying they are useful. In the case of Mongols it allowed them to control far more territory because if any one group stepped out of line they were slaughtered. If every group stepped out of line at the same time then the Mongols probably can’t win.
If you’re able to do mass civilian damage then you probably do have the means of winning in that sector. It seems most of the examples are more to pacify the population. If your less locally powerful then your probably only have enough bombs to choose between factories or civilians and the factory is likely better.
Yes, killing your enemies is good actually. But that doesn't mean a particular attack is a good use of resources, and it doesn't say anything about whether that attach is necessary or sufficiant to acheive victory.
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