We Thought Tech Would Make War More Precise. We Were Wrong.

When, last month, President Trump threatened to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant, tit for tat, any time a missile or drone attacked an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, he was promising what would have looked, not very long ago, like an unconscionable act of military retribution: attacking energy infrastructure to impose pain on civilians.

They used to call this kind of thing a war crime. But somewhat suddenly, it has become a nearly universal feature of 21st-century conflict. Iran has been targeting energy infrastructure around the Persian Gulf since the very first day of fighting in February. Ukraine and Russia have been striking each other’s oil refineries and power grids for several years now. In Gaza, Israel has destroyed much of the electricity distribution network, periodically blocked the arrival of fuel and struck nearly every hospital and medical facility in the region. In Sudan, there have been drone attacks on power plants, substations and fuel depots from both sides in the ongoing civil war, plunging the country into blackouts and humanitarian crisis. In Yemen, the Houthis are firing on tankers in the Red Sea to restrict the flow of oil through the Bab al-Mandab Strait and are reportedly planning strikes against the largest oil production facility in Saudi Arabia, in a bid to pinch global markets ahead of the American midterm elections.

At West Point’s Modern War Institute, they are calling it the age of energy warfare. All around the world, civilian power supply — technically off-limits, according to international law, wherever that still applies — has become a “frontline target” in a new kind of conflict, four experts wrote in the report, published last month. Electricity plants, substations, transmission grids — military planners have always taken note of these systems, along with hospitals and water systems and other logistical features of civilian infrastructure. But for decades it has been rare for great powers to openly target energy supply, and often a kind of humanitarian outrage followed when anyone did, which meant that a broad expectation of civility prevailed. “Such sanctuary,” the authors of the West Point report wrote, “is over.” Energy infrastructure has become a much more common target, particularly as conflicts drag on in regions temptingly full of power plants and pipelines. “All of a sudden,” says Morgan Bazilian, an energy-systems scholar at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines and an author of the report, “our distaste for anything outside of the rules of war doesn’t look all that strong.”

The change is partly technological, with drones and other autonomous weapons making it much easier to strike behind enemy lines, much harder to defend against such attacks and perhaps less pressing to consider whether they constitute violation of some high-minded norms. For decades, military ***ysts liked to talk about “fourth-generation warfare,” in which stronger national militaries found themselves engaging with nonstate actors — insurgents, terrorists, mercenaries and private contractors. But the battles of the war on terror now seem like relatively distant memories, and attacks on energy systems have emerged as one striking harbinger of what’s to come. We may be watching the arrival of a fifth generation, in which even superpowers act a bit more as insurgents do, in which the line between open fighting and economic conflict grows harder to discern and in which the prohibition against strikes on nonmilitary targets begins to look more like a relic of an earlier age.