Infrastructure Under Fire: How Modern Warfare Destroys Civilian Life While Law Watches in Silence -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

No longer does modern warfare start with soldiers. It begins with darkness. The lights go out. Water stops running. Hospitals fall silent. And somewhere far, far away from the frontlines a child dies not of a bullet, but of the slow suffocation of a system deliberately dismantled. This isn’t collateral damage. It is strategy. Civilian infrastructure destruction is now a deliberate strategy of war in modern conflict. Power grids are bombed not to weaken armies, but to paralyze societies. Water systems are targeted not to win battles, but to manufacture desperation. Hospitals have not been struck accidentally but because the very act of healing has become a threat to military objectives. What we are watching isn’t the gradual disintegration of humanitarian norms.

It’s their systematic inversion. International humanitarian law (based on the Geneva Conventions) is clear: civilians and civilian objects must be protected. The principle of distinction is not a suggestion, it is a cornerstone. The principle of proportionality is not discretionary; it is binding. But in practice, these truths are becoming rhetorical flourishes, used in press statements and disregarded in targeting rulings. The legal language still exists. The reality it aims to govern has crumpled.

What makes this moment so uniquely dangerous, however, is not simply the scale of destruction, but the normalization of that destruction. Every strike on a power plant is understood to be a “dual-use” target. Every water facility that is destroyed is recast as a “necessary” consequence. Every hospital reduced to rubble is rationalized away as an “operational error.” A legal vocabulary has been weaponized to sanitize the architecture of suffering. This is how law dies not with open defiance, but with strategic reinterpretation.

The doctrine of “military necessity” was once only allowed so far on humanitarian grounds, but the boundaries of such “necessity” are being blown away. If all that supports civilian life can be reframed as serving indirectly the enemy, then nothing stays protected. Electricity powers communication; communication supports coordination; coordination supports resistance. Under this logic, you get to make every civilian object a target. The exception swallows the rule. And so, the battlefield thickens not geographically, but existentially.

The war is no longer waged between enemies. It’s fought on the terms that make civilian life possible. The results are devastating, calculated. Structurally, destroying infrastructure doesn’t just interrupt services, it dismantles survival. Hospitals can’t be functional without electricity. And without water, disease spreads. Food supply chains collapse in the absence of fuel. The result is a slow violence less visible than airstrikes, but much more pervasive. It is death by design. Yet accountability is elusive. International institutions issue statements.

Investigations are announced. Legal frameworks are cited. But enforcement, the very mechanism that makes law meaningful is conspicuously absent. States that regularly hit civilian infrastructure face no immediate consequence. Commanders who authorize such strikes lack any deterrents. Instead, you’ve got a tacit understanding: The cost of running afoul of the law is lower than the opportunity to break it. This is not a failure of law. It is a failure of the will. The international community has erected an elaborate legal structure to regulate war, but it has failed to equip it with teeth. Courts are slow moving, and legal responsibility is contested or displaced by political interests. This often leads to a situation in which laws have to be carried out but do not yet provide any real legal force. This is where impunity has its roots. And in areas of impunity, norms deteriorate. Instead, what we have left behind is a dangerous illusion: a faith that the mere presence of law guarantees its effect. It is not. No law without enforcement is not protection; it is a performance. If we let such intentional devastation of civilian infrastructure go unimpeded, we must acknowledge an uncomfortable truth modern warfare has outgrown everything we preach about protecting it. The rules still apply, but they no longer restrain. They legitimize. This cannot continue.

The defense of civilian infrastructure must be re-emphasized not as an abstract principle but as a binding red line. This demands more than critique. It requires consequences immediate, certain and inevitable. Enforcement of the criminal charges against any and all decisions that lead to the systematic destruction of life support systems for civilians must thus evoke a sort of automatic judicial examination, independent investigation and if needed, prosecution. Not years later, but now. Because the law is being tested every time the lights go off. And every time the world is silent, it fails. It is not that a system that professes to defend civilians while allowing a country to obliterate everything they rely on fails to deliver on promises will. It deceives.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia