From Strategic Bombing to Precision Strike: Continuity and Adaptation in Infrastructure Targeting

Infrastructure targeting has been a recurrent feature of modern warfare, but its history does not represent a linear transition from isolated targets to the discovery of interdependence. Interwar air-power theorists, particularly at the Air Corps Tactical School, already treated industrial economies as networks of vulnerable nodes. This article compares six cases: the Second World War, Cold War targeting doctrine, Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Allied Force and Ukraine. It argues that the underlying targeting logic remained broadly continuous, while surveillance, target selection, weapon accuracy and reach, political control and multidomain integration changed. The cases trace its wartime testing, Cold War institutionalisation, limits in Vietnam, precision application in Desert Storm, constrained adaptation in Kosovo and contemporary multidomain use in Ukraine. The article links the histories of strategic bombing, air power, precision strike and infrastructure warfare.