[hackuser]

Following on what M_Grey says, I'd say beyond a doubt the U.S. military plans to take down any and all Internet infrastructure as needed as a contingency in war.

Remember the U.S. government has plans to effectively destroy the world with nuclear strikes as a contingency in war. Do you think they would hesitate to prepare plans to take down a data network? It's immoral? Unthinkable?

I'm not criticizing such plans. War is death and destruction, and the U.S. must be prepared.

The U.S., and all nations and citizens, also should do everything to prevent situations where war is the best remaining option. This requires sober, expert foresight in foreign policy and politics, anticipating 2nd-, 3rd-, and n-order effects, not emotional, knee-jerk ideology and amateur foreign policy.

[M_Grey]

This is exactly true. Military forces make plans for everything, then make more plans, then study the plans, practice them, and revise them. It's actually the single biggest activity of any military, day in, day out. We're not going to change that anytime soon either.

As you say, we need to be active as citizens in ensuring that either such a war never occurs (in which case lets be realistic, a loss of the internet is going to the prelude to mushroom clouds), or that conflict is minimized and if necessary, occurs through proxies. It's ugly, it's not the way we should do things, but it is the way we do things.