The First Targets of a Modern War (And Why)

At 3:02 in the morning on February 24th, 2022, tens of thousands of satellite modems across Europe went dead simultaneously. There was no explosion, no warning, just silence. One hour later, Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border, and the world woke up to a war that had already begun.

Most people think wars start when troops cross a border or when planes appear on the horizon. That comes second. The first part is invisible, and by the time anyone notices it, the damage is already done.

That Viasat hack knocked out communications for the Ukrainian military right when they needed them most. It also disrupted wind turbines in Germany and internet service across rural France. One cyberattack, launched from a keyboard, and an entire continent felt it before a single shot was fired.

This was a planned opening move. Modern militaries follow a specific sequence when they go to war, and it looks like a checklist. The targets come in a particular order, for particular reasons, and that order tells you a lot about how wars are fought today.

So let’s walk through it, target by target, in the order they’d be hit, and why each one matters.

Blind Them

There’s a version of how wars start that most of us carry around in our heads. Two armies march toward each other, they meet on a field somewhere, and the fighting begins. Maybe there’s a dramatic charge, maybe there’s a tense standoff first, but the basic idea is that wars start when soldiers meet soldiers.

And for most of human history, that was more or less true. Gettysburg, Waterloo, the Somme. Armies clashed where they found each other, and the side with more men or better tactics or just dumb luck usually won. War was, at its core, a physical meeting of forces.

But modern war starts much earlier. It starts with radar stations exploding in the dark, hours before any soldier sees another soldier. If you can blind your enemy’s air defenses, you own the sky. And if you own the sky, you own everything underneath it.

January 17th, 1991. 2:38 in the morning, local time. Eight AH-64 Apache helicopters are flying low over the Saudi desert, so low their rotor wash is kicking up sand. They’re being led to their targets by Air Force MH-53J Pave Low helicopters, because the Apaches’ own navigation systems weren’t precise enough for what they needed to do. Their mission was to destroy two Iraqi early warning radar stations sitting right on the border.

These weren’t random targets. Coalition planners needed a corridor, a twenty-mile-wide gap in Iraq’s radar coverage, so that F-117 stealth bombers could slip through and hit Baghdad. The Apaches had to punch that hole open exactly twenty-two minutes before the F-117s arrived. Not twenty-one or twenty-three. Twenty-two.

The pilots had trained on full-scale mock-ups of the radar sites for months in the Saudi desert. They’d rehearsed the attack so many times they could practically do it blindfolded. The mission was designated Task Force Normandy, and it was one of the most tightly held operations of the war. Those helicopters fired the first shots of Desert Storm. Before the tanks, before the infantry, before anything else, the first act of the war was destroying radar.

The Apaches handled two specific stations. But the coalition had a much bigger radar problem across the rest of Iraq. The solution was the AGM-88 HARM missile, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile. It homes in on radar emissions. A radar station sends out a beam to detect aircraft, and the HARM follows that beam right back to its source. It uses the enemy’s own radar against them.

Iraqi radar operators figured this out pretty quickly. They learned that when they heard coalition aircraft approaching, the smart move was to shut off their radar immediately. The US military had a dry term for this, they called it “radiation avoidance.” And it created a brutal choice for every radar operator in Iraq. Turn on your system and a HARM missile follows your signal back and kills you. Or turn it off and survive, but now you can’t see anything coming.

Either way, the coalition won. The radar was destroyed or the radar was silent. Both outcomes meant the same thing for Iraqi air defenses: they were blind.

Then the F-117 Nighthawk really came into its own. This was an aircraft with a radar cross-section roughly the size of a marble. Against a fully operational, well-coordinated air defense network, stealth helps but it isn’t magic. Against a network where half the radars are destroyed and the other half are too scared to turn on, the F-117 was practically invisible.

Forty-two F-117s deployed for Desert Storm. They represented about two and a half percent of coalition combat aircraft. But they struck roughly forty percent of designated strategic targets. That ratio only makes sense when you understand that the air defense network had already been torn apart before those jets ever took off.

This isn’t just a 1991 story. In October 2024, when Israel struck targets inside Iran, the first things they hit were S-300 air defense batteries protecting Tehran. Specifically the battery sitting at Imam Khomeini International Airport. Earlier that same year, in April, Israeli strikes had destroyed the air defense radar guarding the Natanz nuclear facility. Different decade, different countries, different technology, same logic. Before you hit anything else, you kill the thing that can see you coming.

So the old image of war starting with armies on a battlefield still works for Austerlitz. But in any modern conflict, the first act is the same. You destroy the enemy’s ability to detect what’s coming next. You can’t shoot down what you can’t track, and you can’t intercept what you can’t see. Every modern war begins by making the enemy blind.

Deafen Them

Most of us assume that modern militaries are built to survive exactly this kind of attack. Redundant communications, backup headquarters, decentralized authority, the whole system is designed so that no single strike can cripple the network, and that assumption makes sense because military doctrine since World War II has been working toward it.

But there’s a gap between what militaries plan for and what they actually build. Redundancy is expensive. It requires duplicate infrastructure, parallel chains of command, and constant training for scenarios where the primary system goes down. In practice, most nations centralize because it’s cheaper and faster. One fiber-optic backbone is easier to maintain than five. One air defense command center coordinates better than twenty regional ones acting independently.

That’s the weakness the United States exploited on January 17th, 1991.

Among the first targets of Operation Desert Storm were Iraq’s communications nodes in downtown Baghdad. F-117 stealth fighters dropped precision-guided munitions on the Al-Karkh telecommunications center. The Iraqi Air Force headquarters was struck in the same opening wave. So was Saddam Hussein’s fiber-optic network, the backbone connecting his centralized air defense system to radar installations and missile batteries across the country.

Within 24 hours, Iraq’s integrated air defense command was non-functional. Local commanders still had their equipment. They had surface-to-air missiles, radar stations, and anti-aircraft guns, but they had no orders. They couldn’t coordinate with neighboring units. They couldn’t report what they were seeing or request support. Each site became an island, reacting to whatever flew overhead without any sense of the larger picture.

The architect behind this approach was Colonel John Warden III, and he’d been thinking about this problem for years. Warden ran an Air Force strategy office called Checkmate, and he’d developed something called the Five Ring Model. Picture five concentric circles. The outermost ring is Fielded Forces, the tanks, the infantry, the ships. Moving inward you get Population, then Infrastructure, then Organic Essentials, energy and key production. And at the very center is Leadership.

Traditional warfare works from the outside in. You engage the enemy’s fielded forces, grind through their armies, push toward the capital, and eventually the leadership surrenders or collapses. It’s bloody, it’s slow, and it’s how most wars had been fought for centuries.

Warden flipped that logic. His argument was straightforward. Attack the inner rings, and the outer rings collapse on their own. Take out leadership’s ability to communicate and command, and those fielded forces become a collection of disconnected units with no strategic direction. You don’t need to destroy the enemy’s army if you can cut its communication and command.

His plan was called Instant Thunder, and the name was deliberate. During Vietnam, the American air campaign was called Rolling Thunder, a strategy of gradual escalation designed to slowly increase pressure on North Vietnam. It ran for three and a half years and failed. Warden wanted the opposite. Instant Thunder proposed striking 84 strategic targets in just six days. There was no gradual ramp-up or signaling of intentions, just overwhelming force against the nodes that held everything together.

And it worked. The coalition flew over 100,000 sorties during Desert Storm, but the war’s outcome was largely decided in those opening hours. Once Iraq’s command and control network went dark, everything else was cleanup. Iraqi units that tried to fight did so without coordination, without intelligence, and without any understanding of where coalition forces actually were. Units that might have mounted a serious defense instead sat in position waiting for orders that would never arrive.

The Gulf War proved something military planners have taken seriously ever since. A military with functioning weapons but no communication is less dangerous than one with worse weapons and a working network. Iraq had the fourth-largest army in the world in 1991. They had modern Soviet equipment, battle-hardened troops from the Iran-Iraq War, and fortified positions they’d had months to prepare. None of it mattered. The weapons don’t matter if nobody can tell them where to shoot.

Isolate Them — The Power Grid

If you wanted to knock out a country’s electricity, you’d bomb the power plants. That’s the obvious move. Power stations are big, visible, and they’re where electricity gets made. Take them out and the lights go off.

And for most of military history, that’s exactly what air forces did. They hit generators, turbine halls, boiler rooms. The logic was simple and felt right. Destroy the thing that makes the power, and there’s no more power.

But there’s a problem with that logic. Power plants, even badly damaged ones, can be patched back together surprisingly fast. Ukraine proved this over and over in 2022 and 2023. Russia would hit a thermal power station with cruise missiles, and Ukrainian engineers would have it producing electricity again within days, sometimes hours.

The generators themselves are tough, modular, and repairable. You can fly in parts, weld things together, and get turbines spinning again with duct tape and determination. So Russia kept hitting the same stations, and Ukraine kept fixing them, and the whole thing turned into a very expensive game of whack-a-mole.

Then Russia changed its approach, and the results were devastating.

Starting in late 2023 and accelerating through 2024, Russian strikes shifted away from the power plants themselves and toward something much more vulnerable: large power transformers, or LPTs. These are the massive units that step voltage up or down so electricity can travel across the national grid. They weigh over 400 tons each. They take 12 to 18 months to manufacture. They cost between five and ten million dollars apiece. And there are only a handful of factories in the entire world that can build them.

You can’t repair an LPT in a field with spare parts and welding gear. When one is destroyed, it’s gone. The replacement is sitting in a production queue somewhere in Europe or South Korea, months away from delivery.

Russia also figured out something about nuclear power. Ukraine gets roughly half its electricity from nuclear plants, and you obviously can’t bomb a nuclear reactor. The consequences would be catastrophic, and the international response would be immediate. But you don’t have to touch the reactor at all.

You destroy the substation that connects it to the grid. The plant keeps running perfectly fine. The fuel rods stay cool, the turbines keep spinning. It just can’t send power anywhere.

The electricity has nowhere to go.

This wasn’t even a new idea. During the Gulf War in 1991, coalition planners figured out the same thing about Iraq’s grid. They deliberately avoided destroying power plants because those are expensive and time-consuming to rebuild. Instead, they hit transformer yards and switching stations.

They used carbon fiber bombs that draped conductive filaments across electrical equipment, shorting everything out. The plants survived intact, which made postwar reconstruction easier. But during the war itself, Iraq’s electrical grid was completely non-functional.

The bottleneck in any electrical system isn’t generation. It’s transmission and distribution. A country can have all the power plants in the world, but if the grid connecting them to cities and factories is destroyed, those plants are just expensive buildings making electricity that goes nowhere.

Ukraine has started adapting. Engineers are moving critical grid components underground where they can’t be hit by cruise missiles or drones. The government is pushing hard for decentralized power generation, smaller solar installations, local generators, distributed systems that don’t depend on a handful of massive transformers sitting exposed in open substations. It’s a rethinking of how a national grid should be structured when you’re at war.

But that adaptation takes years. And it highlights something most countries haven’t really grappled with yet. Modern electrical grids were designed for efficiency, not resilience. They concentrate critical equipment in a small number of locations because that’s cheaper and easier to manage. Those large power transformers are the linchpins of the whole system, and in most countries they’re sitting in fenced yards with no meaningful protection against a military strike.

So the target is the thing that moves the power, and right now, in virtually every country on earth, those transformers are standing in open fields, completely exposed.

Silence Them — Undersea Cables and Satellites

We talk about the internet like it’s something ethereal, the cloud, data floating around in the ether, bouncing between servers scattered across the globe. It’s distributed, it’s resilient, and it feels like it’s everywhere and nowhere at once. That story made sense for a long time, because the internet was designed to survive a nuclear war.

But that leaves something out. About 95% of all international internet traffic travels through roughly 570 physical cables lying on the ocean floor. These aren’t some high-tech marvels. They’re about the width of a garden hose, and they sit on the seabed, sometimes buried in shallow water, sometimes just resting in the open at depths of several kilometers. The “cloud” has a very physical address, and it’s exposed.

We got a preview of what attacking undersea infrastructure looks like in September 2022. Someone detonated explosives along the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, rupturing three of four lines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany. The pipelines sat in relatively shallow water, about 70 to 80 meters deep, in one of the most heavily surveilled bodies of water on Earth. And still, nobody stopped it.

Now consider that Russia’s GUGI, the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, operates a fleet of specialized submarines built for deep-sea operations. They’re designed to work on the ocean floor, and Western intelligence agencies have watched them mapping the routes of undersea cables connecting North America to Europe. NATO responded by ramping up submarine patrols near critical cable chokepoints. But the ocean is very large, and those cables are very long.

So the internet has a physical vulnerability most people don’t think about. But communication doesn’t just run underwater. It also runs through space, and space is getting more dangerous too.

In January 2007, China launched a missile that destroyed its own Fengyun-1C weather satellite at an altitude of 865 kilometers. It was a proof of concept, a demonstration that Beijing could take out satellites in orbit. That single test created more than 2,600 pieces of trackable debris, and most of it is still up there, circling the Earth at thousands of kilometers per hour.

Russia followed in November 2021, destroying its own Cosmos 1408 satellite and generating over 1,500 additional debris fragments. The crew aboard the International Space Station had to shelter in their emergency escape capsules because the debris cloud was passing dangerously close.

And you don’t even need to blow anything up. GPS jamming and spoofing have become routine in certain parts of the world. Russia has been disrupting GPS signals across the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean for years now. Thousands of civilian passenger flights have reported navigation anomalies. Commercial aviation can work around it, but military operations can’t as easily.

Modern precision-guided munitions depend on GPS to find their targets. A GPS-guided bomb without a signal becomes a very expensive piece of dumb ordnance falling in roughly the right direction. The revolution in precision warfare that has defined the last three decades of American military dominance rests on a constellation of satellites that everyone now knows how to threaten.

The US Naval Academy quietly reintroduced celestial navigation into its curriculum a few years ago. Midshipmen are learning to use sextants again, reading star positions to determine where they are on the ocean. Because if GPS goes dark, a $100 million warship still needs to know its location. And the only backup that doesn’t rely on satellites or cables or anything electronic, is the stars.

We built the most connected civilization in human history. Information moves at the speed of light across oceans and through orbit. But all of that connectivity runs through physical chokepoints that a sufficiently motivated adversary can cut, jam, or destroy. The most connected society in history is also the most vulnerable to disconnection.

Cripple Them Before They Know

For most of recent history, cyberattacks felt like a nuisance. Stolen emails, defaced websites, ransomware demands that locked up a hospital’s billing system for a few days. Annoying and expensive, sure. But nobody was dying, and nothing was actually blowing up.

That made sense, because what we saw publicly really was digital vandalism. Hackers wanted money or attention or both. Governments talked about “cyber threats” in vague, ominous terms, but the examples they pointed to were always about data: stolen credit cards, leaked personnel files, maybe some embarrassing diplomatic cables. The physical world and the digital world still felt separate.

Then came Stuxnet.

In 2010, security researchers stumbled across a piece of malware unlike anything they’d ever seen. It was sophisticated, clearly the work of a nation-state, and it had one very specific target: the programmable logic controllers running uranium enrichment centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. The malware told those centrifuges to spin roughly 40% faster than their design speed. And while the machines were tearing themselves apart, the monitoring displays in the control room showed completely normal readings.

The operators watched their screens and saw nothing wrong.

Iran destroyed about 1,000 centrifuges before anyone figured out what was happening. The whole thing only came to light because Stuxnet accidentally spread beyond the Natanz air-gapped network to computers it was never supposed to reach. Without that mistake, we might still not know about it.

The US and Israel had jointly built a weapon that caused physical destruction inside a foreign military facility, without firing a shot, without crossing a border, without anyone even knowing they were under attack. That changed the definition of warfare.

Stuxnet was precise. What came next was much broader.

In December 2015, Russian hackers used malware called BlackEnergy to take down sections of Ukraine’s power grid. About 230,000 customers lost electricity. It was the first confirmed cyberattack in history to shut down critical infrastructure. They did it again the following year, hitting a transmission station near Kyiv. These were rehearsals.

And when the real thing came, cyber wasn’t a sideshow. It was the opening act.

In January 2022, weeks before any tanks moved, Russia deployed WhisperGate wiper malware across Ukrainian government systems. More than sixty government websites went dark simultaneously. That was the softening. Then, at 3:02 AM on February 24th, the Viasat satellite hack hit.

Tens of thousands of satellite modems were bricked simultaneously across Europe. Ukrainian military communications went down. And as collateral damage, about 5,000 wind turbines in Germany were knocked offline because they happened to use the same satellite network.

One hour later, Russian ground forces crossed the border.

They wiped the enemy’s communications, hit government systems, knocked out satellite coverage, and then sent in the armor. The cyberattacks were part of the invasion. They were the first phase.

Now, Ukraine actually held up pretty well on the cyber front, partly because they’d been dealing with Russian digital attacks for years and had hardened their systems. But the playbook was clear, and every military on Earth was taking notes.

Cyber weapons have a feature conventional weapons don’t: they can be pre-positioned. A traditional military has to mobilize troops, move equipment, build up supply lines. Satellites can watch all of that happening. But malware can sit inside a power grid or a water treatment system or a financial network for months or years, doing nothing, completely invisible, waiting for one signal to activate.

Security researchers have a term for these: they call them “implants.” And they find new ones regularly in critical infrastructure across dozens of countries. Sometimes they can attribute them to a specific government. Sometimes they can’t.

The first shot in the next major war has probably already been fired. It may be sitting dormant in a server rack somewhere, in a power station or a water utility or a banking system, waiting. We just won’t know about it until someone sends the activation signal.

The Sequence

So let’s put this all together. Modern war starts quietly.

Weeks before any missile flies, cyber operations are already underway. Malware is sitting inside power grids, communications networks, and financial systems, waiting. The enemy doesn’t know the war has started yet, and that’s the point.

Then come the first minutes. Cruise missiles and stealth aircraft hit radar installations and surface-to-air missile sites. This is SEAD, the suppression of enemy air defenses. In this phase, you’re trying to open the way so everything else can move through it.

Within the first hours, the targets shift to command and control. Military headquarters, communications hubs, the nodes where generals talk to their forces in the field. Cut those links, and a million-man army becomes disconnected units with no orders and no picture of what’s happening around them.

Over the first days, you go after the enemy’s airfields, aircraft shelters, and fuel depots. You’re establishing air superiority. Once you own the sky, everything the enemy does on the ground becomes visible and vulnerable.

Then come the first weeks. Power plants, telephone exchanges, bridges, rail yards. You’re dismantling the country’s ability to sustain a war effort. Troops can’t fight if they can’t eat, can’t move, and can’t communicate with anyone above or beside them.

And while you’re hitting fielded forces throughout, the ground offensive waits until the radars are blind, the generals are cut off, the airfields are craters, and the grid is dark.

The Gulf War proved this sequence works. The coalition achieved air superiority within a week. They flew over 100,000 sorties and dropped 88,500 tons of bombs across 39 days. Iraq had roughly 500,000 troops in the theater. By the time the coalition ground offensive began on February 24th, that army was severely degraded and in many sectors barely functional. The ground war lasted about 100 hours.

You fight everything that makes the enemy army function first. By the time ground forces actually engage, they’re facing an opponent that’s disconnected, blind, cut off, with no power, no communications, and no supply chain.

The wars we see on television, tanks rolling through cities, infantry clearing buildings, rubble and smoke, are often wars where the shape was set earlier. The decisive moments happened earlier, in fiber-optic cables and server rooms and radar dishes on remote hilltops nobody has ever heard of.

Every modern military on Earth is studying this same sequence right now. They’re reading the same case studies, running the same simulations, and building the same capabilities. The logic is clear, and the results are hard to ignore.

So the question is whether your country is ready for someone to use it on you.

Key Takeaways

• Modern wars begin with cyberattacks and disabling enemy radar systems.
• The first phase of modern warfare focuses on blinding and deafening the enemy.
• Critical infrastructure, like power grids and undersea cables, are vulnerable targets.
• Cyber weapons can be pre-positioned and activated without prior detection.
• The sequence of modern warfare targets communication, command, and critical infrastructure first.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: The First Targets of a Modern War (And Why)
• Hero image source by Logan Rickert / openverse, by.

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