Russia is currently conducting a strategic strike campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure using precision, long-range munitions targeting power plants, substations, and transmission lines. Targeting energy infrastructure is often a war crime, and this article is not advocating for its better targeting. Instead, it seeks to encourage creativity from planners and the leveraging of industry expertise in considering how the threat may manifest and how to mitigate it.
Military planners have correctly identified the value of targeting energy infrastructure given the modern world’s reliance on it. Russia has the added benefit of their own experts who likely played a role in the building of Ukraine’s energy network during the days of the USSR – knowledge which they are currently using to devastating effect. Even without engineers who helped build the system, it wouldn’t take a few energy experts long to identify the critical lines and nodes in any nation’s energy network.
The Australian Defence Force considered the threat to critical energy infrastructure before February 2022. One of the Army Reserve’s potential roles in a major conflict or severe domestic threat would be home defence, with a priority to defend infrastructure such as power stations. A manifest example is 4th Brigade’s combined operation with Victoria Police, Exercise Austral Shield 2019, which centred on the defence of a regional power station.
Generating energy and transporting it to homes and businesses requires a complex system with multiple steps. To simplify it, fuel is mined/extracted, transported to a power station, converted into electricity, and transported to the consumer. Consider the targetable critical vulnerabilities of such a supply chain to include: the power stations, the mines/extracting facilities, the substations, and transit requirements.
If power stations are sufficiently damaged, they will take a long time to repair. Their small number, however, means air defence systems and ground forces could be efficiently allocated to defend them. The turbines represent the most critical machinery and are housed in large protective structures which present a challenging target, requiring either luck or excessive mass, which would be an inefficient use of combat power. Destroying a turbine would be a high-impact event but the difficulty of achieving it means they present as a target of opportunity rather than a main effort.
The coal/uranium mines and oil/gas extraction facilities are another target as power stations don’t generate without fuel. Mines are again few in number, however, and enough significant infrastructure could be incorporated into plans for physical defence. The enemy’s use of hybrid warfare presents an alternate threat to direct attack in the form of sabotage. A practical method would be fire, especially in a coal mine which can burn for weeks and is difficult to extinguish after it reaches a critical mass.[5] Awareness of this tactic and incorporating reliable sensors into key point-defence strategies could ensure fires are quickly observed and neutralised before causing any long-term outage.
Substations acting as the nodes along the transmission network may be considered a more advantageous target for the enemy. They are too numerous to all be defended simultaneously, lack physical protection, critical components such as transformers are not as easily replaced, and the destruction of a substation would neutralise all lines to which it is connected.
Transit is the final target, which includes getting fuel to the power stations and electricity to the consumer. Unless a power station has an attached mine, fuels are transported via road, rail, and pipeline. Large power lines are needed to transport electricity from the stations, extending for hundreds of kilometres. Failure at any point along the line will shut down the entire supply. They are too widespread to maintain a permanent physical presence and are thus much more easily targeted with simultaneous and repeated strikes at multiple points to provide a harassing effect on energy infrastructure.
Having identified these targets, the specific nature of how they may be targeted must be addressed. Ukraine’s extensive air defence network intercepts most incoming missiles and drones, forcing Russia to deploy en masse, straining their defence industrial base. It is assumed Russia will have to slow its tempo to keep from running out of precision weapons, and the tactical demands of the front line will likely demand they shift focus to support offensive objectives.
Australia’s strategic depth makes employing missiles and drones in this role difficult. A more efficient method would be deploying special or guerrilla forces in a hybrid role. They could be tasked with manoeuvring throughout the country, conducting synchronised attacks with explosives and weapons of low complexity – a method which most closely supports the targeting of transmission lines. While fixed nodes can be defended, the sparsity of transmission lines creates logistical complexity and if a portion of a line is defended, the enemy can simply target elsewhere and achieve the same effect.
Consider an Australian city that is supplied by connected lines to numerous wind farms and interstate connectors. On a low wind day, losing the wind farms and interstate imports would cause a catastrophic supply shortage within the region. If these lines were targeted simultaneously, an entire city would enter a blackout for multiple days; homes would go dark, and factories would shut down.
Critical facilities would have diesel backup but that introduces diesel supply risk, likely competing with Defence vehicles. Second-order effects would cause further disruption; having that much coal supply isolated with negligible demand would throw the delicate supply-demand balance out so severely that most turbines would instantly trip, powering down. The inflexible and unreliable brown coal turbines are slow and expensive to turn back on. The lines themselves would be repaired in a matter of days but a mobile and adaptive enemy could continue targeting different points along a line, keeping it offline for a prolonged period.
Meanwhile, 2nd Division could see themselves protecting impotent power stations as the city is plunged into chaos. Expanding on this strategy, gas pipelines could also be targeted. Destroying a section of the underground pipelines connecting capital cities would cause a gas shortage, affecting industry and winter heating for homes. A technologically advanced enemy could even employ cyber-attacks, synchronised with the physical.
To defend against this enemy course of action, relentless and aggressive patrolling, historically a strength of the Australian Army, could play a large part. Constant mounted patrols along the power lines, railways, and gas pipelines reinforced with unmanned aerial systems to extend reach. Any observed human activity along the line could be quickly intercepted and sabotage thwarted, denying enemy freedom of action and keeping their decision cycle off balance. At the very least, patrolling actions would help prevent sabotage on all lines simultaneously; energy networks have resilience and redundancy built in as a design feature.
Protecting the spectrum of targetable critical vulnerabilities would strain manpower resources, requiring partnering with local police forces and dynamic task organisation based on changing the changing risk profile. Organising the operation in line with existing warfighting tactics, techniques, and procedures would be possible – reducing frictions associated with sustainment, command, and control. The power stations themselves could be considered the main defensive position, acting as the hub for headquarters and combat service support elements. Patrols could be sent out for multiple days or weeks, patrolling the lines, establishing harbours, and sending out multiple, small, mutually supporting patrols of their own.
As Australia and the rest of the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewables, power generation is moving from small numbers of large generators to many small, dispersed generators. This change builds a natural resilience as it becomes increasingly difficult to target enough generators to cripple a country. This natural mitigation against strategic strikes and sabotage campaigns on power stations will highlight the vulnerability of rail, pipelines, and power lines.
Defending civilian infrastructure, at home and abroad, will require a marriage of industry knowledge and the military appreciation process, a strength yet to be truly tapped within the 2nd Division.
