The Internet during world war

There are over 3000 satellites in the Starlink network alone. How many anti-satellite missiles are there? Would taking out all those satellites be worth the cost?

What the war in Ukraine and protests in China have showed the world is, democracy in desperate times survive on Wi-Fi, AirDrop’d screenshots, and dozens of single port phone chargers hanging off power strips.

They don’t even bother to use multi-port chargers, let alone DC to DC converters, or cars rigged for power generation. Not to mention open-source encrypted software-defined self healing mesh network microwave radio protocols.

Maybe wartime is not the best to introduce alternative infrastructure that are inherently new; maybe only what’s there peacetime works.

And if that is the case, what we would need might be such items as, sideloadable resilient mesh apps for teenagers, appliance-fied server for game sessions in University dorms, and parallel chargers for camping.

> I've never been in a conflict zone but I'd assume securing food and water is #1. Reliable electricity access might be a distant nice

This is very wrong, everything NATO/ISAF related excepting the absolutely smallest temporary COP and FOB in Afghanistan had at minimum one basic VSAT terminal with IP link to the outside world.

You can't have modern C4I systems without data links. Note that a lot of what was implemented was not actually "The internet" as we know it, though there was lots of commercial DIA, there's plenty of ways to use two-way satellite capacity for entirely private networks.

The above was a firm rule and ground truth even 15-17 years ago, in the latter stages of the conflict (before the US lost political will to continue in 2021, Thanks, Trump and Pompeo and Biden...) data links for anything military related were even more crucial.

It's an interesting thought experiment! What would happen if electricity ceased suddenly.

If there was no electricity where I am at, the apartment would soon start to cool down. It is right now something like -6°C outside. I think it would take some days to cool down to that level.

Electricity keeps my food refrigerated and frozen, both at home and in the shop. Well, I should put the frozen food out on the balcony (and cover them up so that they don't melt if the sun shines during the day).

Kitchen oven and stove, and water kettle run on electricity. There would be very little cooking going on! Not to mention that electricity is needed to pump water from the ground level up to the apartment. So I should to fill all available containers with snow and take them inside to melt (before the apartment temperature drops below freezing).

Seems like loss of electricity would mean loss of heat, water and food in rapid order. It's difficult to imagine this loss to be very localized, so my neighbours would likely be suffering the same, perhaps the whole suburb. Without apartment or street lights less reliable members of the community might try to take advantage of the situation. Perhaps not, it's not a particularly restless environment. More resourceful members might come up with solutions to problems, but I can imagine the situation to be quite chaotic.

Without communication channels I can't ask if a friend or family member can support me, or if they need support. Or indeed if it is safe to move, and if so, how and where. Lack of street and even apartment lights might be a challenge to many and make traffic overall quite a bit more dangerous.

I don't know how reliable electricity would need to be. But some reasonable level of access to electricity is definitely more important than nice to have.

You seem to be assuming "there is a world war" means "everywhere is a full scale conflict zone", which it doesn't. In reality, the severity of fighting will vary significantly. Some areas may face challenges with food / water, other areas won't. While the power grid may not be reliable in some places, generators, solar power and local power generation will mean that most people will have some level of access to power.

One of the points the article is making is that stuff like "off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing resources, etc" will be important in areas with active fighing / bombardment, many other areas may face entirely different types of challenges.

Do we have a process for quickly revoking CA certs owned by enemy countries? Do we have locally hosted mirrors for important content / services / tools that are hosted across undersea cables? The internet has been more and more integrated into our work lives and it does bear some thought to make those systems more resilient so the economy can maintain some level of functionality in a world war.