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Comment by Aaronstotle | Hacker News Reader

Did you purposefully ignore the line right after the one you quoted?

"The agency is affiliated with Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, and it supports sectors such as the military, civil aviation, agriculture, and maritime."

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Only one of those sectors would justify the act. This is a case of not caring about collateral damage. Most of us will not be in a position to say whether or not the collateral damage was acceptable in order to attain the goal. But we can't pretend that the collateral damage was nonexistent.

It may hurt economically by affecting things like aviation, but is unlikely to directly cause any loss of life. Humans aren't very sensitive to indirect loss of life that only shows up in statistics. It's similar to blowing up Russian oil refineries and gas infrastructure, in that it will impact civilians, but unlike such attacks it won't directly kill civilians. If this already concerns you, you should be very concerned about the economical sanctions imposed on Russia over this war, which have a much greater impact.

It's fine to have opinions over how wars should be fought and where to draw lines, but sadly implementing those opinions and having them survive contact with the reality of war is only realistic if all parties agree on the battlefield. We pretty much just have the Geneva Conventions for this, which Russia has been ignoring[1] anyways by attacking targets like grain silos.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...

Duh. Attacking an oil refinery or lubricants factory would also have "collateral damage" in terms of impacting civil society. So does attacks on port infrastructure. There are very few "strategic" targets that don't.

I feel much better about this kind of "collateral damage" than Russia blowing up Ukrainian grain silos, apartment buildings, and hydroelectric dams.

Isn't that like complaining that the NOAA provides weather report data used by the US military?

And in a conflict, hitting weather forecasting would degrade the enemy capability to operate and plan.

Some operations require good weather, so having better weather forecasting is an advantage.

And?

There are a huge number of valid strategic-level targets that are dual-use. Oil refineries, lubricants and ball bearings factories, etc.

Should the US and China get into a shooting war, you can absolutely expect them to be shooting down "weather satellites" pointing at each other's territory.

its not like weather forecasting has been a key feature of many historic battles. [0]

Or for importing into rocket and artillery systems for accurate targeting.

Or for flight planning of aircraft.

[0] https://www.ksat.com/weather/2022/06/06/how-the-forecast-on-...

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