Strategic Bombing - Strategic Bombing

Strategic Bombing

While the distinction between tactical, operational, and strategic bombing can be blurred, they are distinct methodologies generally used for different purposes. Strategic bombing is a methodology distinct from both tactical bombing and the use of strategic air assets in an operational capacity.

Such a strategy usually involves sustained attacks over a period of time on targets that affect a nation's overall war-making capability, such as factories, railroads, oil refineries, and other resources. Less frequently, individual strategic attacks are made against 'point' targets, such as Britain's RAF Bomber Command attacks against the Ruhr dams by means of the bouncing bomb designed by Barnes Wallis in May 1943.

As strategic bombing aims to undermine an enemy nation-state's ability to wage war, strategic bombers need to be able to reach targets throughout most or all of that nation, and so have tended to be larger, longer-ranged aircraft. Strategic bombers have also been used to support major military ground operations, such as the isolation of Normandy through the bombing of transportation hubs throughout northern France in support of the D-Day invasion, or the carpet bombing of the Axis front lines west of Saint-Lô in support of Operation Cobra.

An aerial attack strategy of deliberately bombing and/or strafing civilian targets in order to break the morale of an enemy, make its civilian population panic, bend the enemy's political leadership to the attacker's will, or to "punish" an enemy, while strategic in nature, is more correctly termed terror bombing.