Military strategy in the context of "Bridgehead"

Strategic bombing is a systematically organized and executed military attack from the air which can utilize strategic bombers, long- or medium-range missiles, or nuclear-armed fighter-bomber aircraft to attack targets deemed vital to the enemy's war-making capability. It is a military strategy used in total war with the goal of defeating the enemy by destroying its morale, its economic ability to produce and transport materiel to the theatres of military operations, or both. The term terror bombing is used to describe the strategic bombing of civilian targets without military value, in the hope of damaging an enemy's morale.

One of the strategies of war is to demoralize the enemy so that peace or surrender becomes preferable to continuing the conflict. Strategic bombing has been used to this end. The phrase "terror bombing" entered the English lexicon towards the end of World War II and many strategic bombing campaigns and individual raids have been described as terror bombing by commentators and historians. Because the term has pejorative connotations, some, including the Allies of World War II, have preferred to use euphemisms such as "morale bombings".

Armoured warfare is the use of armoured fighting vehicles in modern warfare. It is a major component of modern methods of war. The premise of armoured warfare rests on the ability of troops to penetrate conventional defensive lines through use of manoeuvre by armoured units.

Much of the application of armoured warfare depends on the use of tanks and related vehicles used by other supporting arms such as infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled artillery, and other combat vehicles, as well as mounted combat engineers and other support units. The doctrine of armoured warfare was developed to break the static nature of World War I trench warfare on the Western Front, and return to the 19th century school of thought that advocated manoeuvre and decisive battle outcomes in military strategy.

Early thermal weapons, which used heat or burning action to destroy or damage enemy personnel, fortifications or territories, were employed in warfare during the ancient and post-classical periods (approximately the 8th century BC until the mid-16th century AD).

Incendiary devices were frequently used as projectiles during warfare, particularly during sieges and naval battles: some substances were boiled or heated to inflict damage by scalding or burning; other substances relied on their chemical properties to inflict burns or damage. These weapons or devices could be used by individuals, thrown by siege engines, or utilised as army strategy. Incendiary mixtures, such as the petroleum-based Greek fire, could be launched by throwing machines or administered through a siphon. Sulfur- and oil-soaked materials were sometimes ignited and thrown at the enemy, or attached to spears, arrows and bolts and fired by hand or machine.

A military campaign is large-scale long-duration significant military strategy plan incorporating a series of interrelated military operations or battles forming a distinct part of a larger conflict often called a war. The term derives from the plain of Campania, a place of annual wartime operations by the armies of the Roman Republic.

Military tactics encompasses the art of organizing and employing fighting forces on or near the battlefield. They involve the application of four battlefield functions which are closely related – kinetic or firepower, mobility, protection or security, and shock action. Tactics are a separate function from command and control and logistics. In contemporary military science, tactics are the lowest of three levels of warfighting, the higher levels being the strategic and operational levels. Throughout history, there has been a shifting balance between the four tactical functions, generally based on the application of military technology, which has led to one or more of the tactical functions being dominant for a period of time, usually accompanied by the dominance of an associated fighting arm deployed on the battlefield, such as infantry, artillery, cavalry or tanks.

Kautilya's Arthashastra (Sanskrit: कौतिलियम् अर्थशास्त्रम्, IAST: Kautiliyam Arthaśāstram; transl. Kautilya's compendium on worldly affairs) is an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, politics, economic policy and military strategy. The text is likely the work of several authors over centuries, starting as a compilation of Arthashastras, texts which according to Olivelle date from the 2nd c. BCE to the 1st c. CE. These treatises were compiled and amended in a new treatise, according to McClish and Olivelle in the 1st century CE by either an anonymous author or Kautilya, though earlier and later dates have also been proposed. While often regarded as created by a single author, McClish and Olivelle argue that this compilation, possibly titled Daņdanīti, served as the basis for a major expansion and redaction in the 2nd or 3rd century CE by either Kautilya or an anonymous author, when several books, dialogical comments, and the disharmonious chapter-division were added, and a stronger Brahmanical ideology was brought in. The text thus became a proper arthashastra, and was retitled to Kautilya's Arthashastra.

Two names for the text's compilor or redactor are used in the text, Kauṭalya (Kautilya) and Vishnugupta. Chanakya (375–283 BCE), the counsellor of Chandragupta Maurya, is implied in a later interpolation, reinforced by Gupta-era and medieval traditions, which explicitly identified Kautilya with Chanakya. This identification started during the Gupta reign (c. 240–c. 579), strengthening the Gupta's ideological presentation as heirs of the Mauryas. However, the identification has been questioned by scholarship, and rejected by the main studies on the topic since 1965, because of stylistic differences within the text which point to multiple authorship, as well as historical elements which are anachronistic for the Mauryan period, but fit in the first centuries of the Common Era. The Arthashastra was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation, also by Shamasastry, was published in 1915.

In military strategy, a choke point (or chokepoint), or sometimes bottleneck, is a geographical feature on land such as a valley, defile or bridge, or maritime passage through a critical waterway such as a strait, which an armed force is forced to pass through in order to reach its objective, sometimes on a substantially narrowed front and therefore greatly decreasing its combat effectiveness by making it harder to bring superior numbers to bear. A choke point can allow a numerically inferior defending force to use the terrain as a force multiplier to thwart or ambush a much larger opponent, as the attacker cannot advance any further without first securing passage through the choke point.

A military operation (op) is the coordinated military actions of a state, or a non-state actor, in response to a developing situation. These actions are designed as a military plan to resolve the situation in the state or actor's favor. Operations may be of a combat or non-combat nature and may be referred to by a code name for the purpose of national security. Military operations are often known for their more generally accepted common usage names than their actual operational objectives. The operational level of war is between tactics and strategy.

Annihilation is a military strategy in which an attacking army seeks to entirely destroy the military capacity of the opposing army. This strategy can be executed in a single planned pivotal battle, called a "battle of annihilation". A successful battle of annihilation is accomplished through the use of tactical surprise, application of overwhelming force at a key point, or other tactics performed immediately before or during the battle.

The end goal of a battle of annihilation is to cause the leaders of the opposing army to sue for peace due to the complete annihilation of their army and thus inability to further engage in offensive or defensive military action. It is not necessary to kill or capture all, or even most, of an opposing army's forces to annihilate it in the sense used here. Rather, the destruction of the enemy army as a cohesive military force able to offer further meaningful military offense or defense, even if temporarily, is the objective.

Air supremacy (as well as air superiority) is the degree to which a side in a conflict holds control of air power over opposing forces. There are levels of control of the air in aerial warfare. Control of the air is the aerial equivalent of command of the sea.

Air power has increasingly become a powerful element of military campaigns; military planners view having an environment of at least air superiority as a necessity. Air supremacy allows increased bombing efforts, tactical air support for ground forces, paratroop assaults, airdrops and simple cargo plane transfers, which can move ground forces and supplies. Air power is a function of the degree of air superiority and numbers or types of aircraft, but it represents a situation that defies black-and-white characterization. The degree of a force's air control is a zero-sum game with its opponent's; increasing control by one corresponds to decreasing control by the other. Air forces unable to contest for air superiority or air parity can strive for air denial, where they maintain an operations level conceding air superiority to the other side, but preventing it from achieving air supremacy.