I suppose most of it is that terrorism and just any ideological violence is more about sending a message than being effective. This isn't total war. The point isn't really to outage a random town/county from power or internet. You want to be flashy and obvious. It's why suicide missions are the common method. Being a martyr is more ideologically powerful than causing massive damage.
If you're subtle but effective, you look evil, and you're so clean and effective that for the most part people aren't scare of you. You don't even really want people to be scared of you.
I mean you have the Russians waging total war on Ukraine with much better than improvised weapons and they can only keep the power off sometimes. That sends a very clear signal to me.
And Ukraine is doing a lot more to defend than some random US local police department is doing against an unexpected attack.
That's the point. These sort of oppression attacks are mostly effective if you can keep them up. Power out for a day or two is annoying, but power out for half of the week every week for months is effective oppression. People tend to bond over trouble and oppression.
By comparison, suicide attacks on some significant or vulnerable place sends the sort of message that resonates for years. Oppression only is really effective if you can keep it up until you fully control the situation and develop some hegemony.
Is total war one of those watered-down phrases that carries an implied “within reason” along with it? Because it doesn’t really look like Russia is putting everything they have into the war effort. Maybe everything they have, within reason.
No? Total war just means you consider attacking non military targets as ok and you're essentially willing to sacrifice your domestic economy and civilian life to win. That definitely seems to mostly fit what Russia is doing, even if you don't feel like they're doing it effectively. Thusfar the only thing it seems they haven't been willing to use is nuclear weapons, and there's a reasonable argument that they're not doing that because they don't think it would help their position.
Total war doesn't mean you're required to use everything and sacrifice everything, just that you're internally willing to, which is obviously hard to determine in the moment as an external observer. It does seem like we're close enough to use the term in the moment.
If you're subtle but effective, you look evil, and you're so clean and effective that for the most part people aren't scare of you. You don't even really want people to be scared of you.