People in the flames of war don’t care too much about power outages

　　As winter approaches, a new trend emerges in the Russo-Ukrainian war. After the Crimean Bridge was destroyed, Russia immediately launched an attack on Ukraine’s power system and other civilian facilities. Under the attack of cruise bombs, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, one-third of Ukraine’s power facilities have been destroyed. It warned of “serious” emerging risks to its grid. As more and more basic civilian facilities are attacked by the Russian army, civilians in Ukraine are facing a worse living environment, especially the damage to civilian facilities in winter will seriously affect the lives of civilians, and may even cause casualties due to cold-induced diseases , which of course is a serious problem that Ukraine has to deal with.
　　The situation is serious, but it still cannot be considered that an attack of this level will necessarily change the direction of war, because countries often only produce a collective resilience after entering a state of war, and this resilience will become the decisive factor of war.
　　In fact, humans and even all mammals have developed an instinct to deal with crises during the evolution of nature. For example, dogs will be obedient and obedient when they are beaten with sticks in daily situations, but once they attack, even if they use iron rods to hit the vital parts of their heads, the dogs will still bite the target and never stop. This performance of dogs is actually a special ability evolved by mammals, which can temporarily shield their own pain nerves in a combat state, and through the secretion of adrenaline, they can complete a fatal blow to the opponent against the pain, and then Consider the question of healing. Of course, humans also have this ability. The governments, countries and other groups formed by humans have evolved into two organizational states of peace and war. In a state of war, the organization and its members’ structural and psychological resilience are the core of winning the war. ability.
　　From an organizational perspective, a country’s transformation from a state of peace to a state of war is equivalent to the activation of a painless fighting mechanism by mammals. In the feudal era, only the feudal lord and his professional soldiers had the right and obligation to participate in the war, but the current wartime mobilization system will mobilize every member of society to participate in the war. This war mobilization mechanism originated from Napoleon. He began to mobilize a large number of civilians to join the army, and relied on nationalist ideology to guide the people to support the war he launched. By the time of World War I, wartime mobilization had risen to the concept of total warfare. The so-called concentration of forces to do big things—in short, when a war broke out, everyone was mobilized to participate in the war. Of course, young and middle-aged men may be mobilized. After joining the army, even the elderly, weak, women and children can become auxiliary military personnel, and the production and economic activities in society mainly serve military purposes. The top priority at this time is to win the war.
　　In addition, the rationing of daily life can also be included in the state of wartime. For example, military mobilization agencies centrally control living materials and strategic materials, and the consumption and life of the people are compressed to a level that can only meet basic needs, so that the army can obtain more resource. In other words, once a state of wartime mobilization is entered, even if social resources are relatively scarce, the war can still continue. As for public crises such as water and electricity cutoffs that may cause instability on weekdays, it may not be a big deal for the people during the war. After all, during a war, everyone’s psychological expectation is that the war will bring harm, and it is common for people to lose their lives. At that time, the unstable water and electricity supply and the lack of mobile phone signal were just minor problems.

On November 5, 2022, Kyiv, cars drive on the road near the National Museum of Ukraine. Figure/Visual China

　　In war, the mentality of civilians will also change. They often don’t think too much about the reasons for the outbreak of war, but only resent those who directly hurt them. For example, after the United States launched air strikes on the Japanese mainland in the late World War II, most Japanese people did not resent the Japanese militaristic government that launched the war. They only hated the American soldiers who directly dropped bombs to bomb their homes. The reason why the city has become ruins but the Japanese military still has the confidence to clamor for “100 million pieces of jade”.
　　Going back to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we will find that Ukraine has been aware of the possibility of a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine since the Crimea crisis in 2014, so it has been preparing for as long as 8 years. First of all, Ukraine resumed the conscription system, requiring all school-age youths to join the army and participate in military training; later, with the continuous armed conflicts in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian army consciously sent troops to participate in the conflicts and exercise their combat effectiveness; Militia groups like Suying have further expanded the base of military mobilization forces.
　　Due to years of mobilization, in addition to active troops, Ukraine also has a potential mobilization force of more than one million. This not only allowed it to rapidly expand its garrison force at the beginning of the war, but also the whole people have been given a psychological precaution against war through years of military mobilization. . So in this Russia-Ukraine conflict, it is not surprising that Ukraine has shown amazing war resilience.