Some cases would be, I expect, obvious in the context of war - missile launch sites or warships, for example. Still, not everything would or could be so obviously “military.” So what is the definition? Where is the cutoff between “military” and “non-military?”
So I did a - I can’t call it a deep dive, but we could say I got waist deep. Call it a short exercise in definition-hunting. And this is what I found.
First, according to a guidance document called “Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition Support for Joint Operations,” one of a series of such guidance documents put out by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
[t]he objective of targeting is to affect, change, modify, or impede enemy activity through destruction, damage, deception, or neutralization.
It added that military targets may be divided into strategic, operational, or tactical.
Tactical targets are those intended to have an “immediate or near-term effect on the outcome of the operation.” Simply, those attacked during a battle.
Operational targets are “those targets deemed critical to the enemy’s capability to conduct successful campaigns.” That is, they are geared not to advancing your offensives but to trying to keep the other side from launching their own.
Finally, strategic targets are those that “influence the overall war effort or political objectives”1 and are “targeted against an enemy’s will to fight and capacity to sustain war.”
Okay, okay, but what’s a “target?” That was the question.
Well, “target,” another guidance document, this one on “Joint Targeting,” helpfully explains, a “target” is
[a]n entity that performs a function for the adversary or enemy considered for possible engagement.
And that’s all very bureaucratic, all very technocratic, but not very revealing.
Except.
There is a thread running through all that which may not be clear at first. A military target is anything that “performs a function” and that destroying will not only help win a battle but by “influenc[ing] the overall war effort or political objectives” can help win a war, with “destroying” meaning not only physical destruction of buildings and the like but psychological destruction of people and their “will to fight.”
In short, a military target is anything and everything you think destroying will help you destroy your enemy.
So I encourage you to read the accounts about “military targets” with a jaundiced eye, hear then with a jaundiced ear, because this would not be the first time that a little, let’s call it linguistic flexibility - and how’s that for a Pentagon-y sounding term - has been applied to the concept of “target.”
For example, during the Afghanistan War, the US military had a guidance rule that said that all military-age males were assumed to be insurgents - and so legitimate targets. After an “incident” in October 2012 involving killing some children, it was suggested by a senior Army officer in Afghanistan that the “aperture” - the opening in the philosophical lens through which through the military looks at the world - could be widened to include “children with potential hostile intent.”
During the 1991 Iraq War, during which the US methodically bombed Iraq from north to south, the Pentagon justified attacking telephone switching stations, railroad stations, public roads, and similar seemingly non-military targets on the grounds that in fact they were legitimate military targets because they “could help Iraq’s military,” a definition by which, I noted at the time, “it becomes hard to think of anything that is not a ‘military target.’”
Even harder than you may think. In 1972, during the Indochina War, an antiwar group2 uncovered a military training manual in use at the time which defined a military target as, quoting,
Any person, thing, idea, entity, or location selected for destruction, inactivation, or rendering non-usable with weapons which will reduce or destroy the will or ability of the enemy to resist.
So again, military targets are anything, anything at all, whether physical, psychological, or emotional, that you think attacking will help you win. Period.
Yes, there may be lists of “prohibited targets” in Iran, in fact I’m sure there are. One of those guidance documents even says checking a list of prohibited targets is part of the process of targeting. But the very fact that there is a list just points up the fact that yes, there is a list and the protection it affords exists only as long as the current iteration of that list. And the “aperture” through which the military and its commanders view the world can always be “widened.”
War has its own rules set by its own definitions and ultimately, all supposed “rules” and “laws,” all prohibitions, along with the very concept of “civilian,” fall before the ultimate imperative of “victory.”
Please, please, bear that always in mind in reading or hearing the war news and don’t be dulled by euphemisms like “struck military targets.”
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1According to the Asser Institute for International and European Law, under international law a military attack “must be made in order to gain a military advantage, not a political one. Attacks for the purpose of affecting civilian morale are not permitted.” Which means that quoted guidance embraces war crimes, but since holding anyone to account for war crimes is a privilege reserved for the winners, I’m going to note that embrace and then leave that aside for another time.
2The group was called NARMIC and it produced a heavily-documented slide show on “The Automated Air War.” My copy of the show and the supporting citations has long since become buried in the sands of time, but that definition became tattooed on my memory.
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