Missile in the context of Weapon of war

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".

Aerial warfare is the use of military aircraft and other flying machines in warfare. Aerial warfare includes bombers attacking enemy installations or a concentration of enemy troops or strategic targets; fighter aircraft battling for control of airspace; attack aircraft engaging in close air support against ground targets; naval aviation flying against sea and nearby land targets; gliders, helicopters and other aircraft to carry airborne forces such as paratroopers; aerial refueling tankers to extend operation time or range; and military transport aircraft to move cargo and personnel.

Historically, military aircraft have included lighter-than-air balloons carrying artillery observers; lighter-than-air airships for bombing cities; various sorts of reconnaissance, surveillance, and early warning aircraft carrying observers, cameras, and radar equipment; torpedo bombers to attack enemy vessels; and military air-sea rescue aircraft for saving downed airmen. Modern aerial warfare includes missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. Surface forces are likely to respond to enemy air activity with anti-aircraft warfare.

A weapon, arm, or armament is any implement or device that is used to deter, threaten, inflict physical damage, harm, or kill. Weapons are used to increase the efficacy and efficiency of activities such as hunting, crime (e.g., murder), law enforcement, self-defense, warfare, or suicide. In a broader context, weapons may be construed to include anything used to gain a tactical, strategic, material, or mental advantage over an adversary or enemy target.

While ordinary objects such as rocks and bottles can be used as weapons, many objects are expressly designed for the purpose; these range from simple implements such as clubs and swords to complicated modern firearms, tanks, missiles and biological weapons. Something that has been repurposed, converted, or enhanced to become a weapon of war is termed weaponized, such as a weaponized virus or weaponized laser.

Military vehicles are commonly armoured (or armored; see spelling differences) to withstand the impact of shrapnel, bullets, shells, rockets, and missiles, protecting the personnel inside from enemy fire. Such vehicles include armoured fighting vehicles like tanks, aircraft, and ships.

Civilian vehicles may also be armoured. These vehicles include cars used by officials (e.g., presidential limousines), reporters and others in conflict zones or where violent crime is common. Civilian armoured cars are also routinely used by security firms to carry money or valuables to reduce the risk of highway robbery or the hijacking of the cargo.

An air-to-surface missile (ASM) or air-to-ground missile (AGM) is a missile designed to be launched from military aircraft at targets on land or sea. There are also unpowered guided glide bombs not considered missiles. The two most common propulsion systems for air-to-surface missiles are rocket motors, usually with shorter range, and slower, longer-range jet engines. Some Soviet-designed air-to-surface missiles are powered by ramjets, giving them both long range and high speed.

Guidance for air-to-surface missiles is typically via laser guidance, infrared guidance, optical guidance or via satellite guidance signals. The type of guidance depends on the type of target. Ships, for example, may be detected via passive radar or active radar homing, which is less effective against multiple, small, fast-moving land targets.

Ammunition, also known as ammo, is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. The term Ammunition includes both expendable weapons (e.g., bombs, missiles, grenades, land mines), and the component parts of other weapons that create the effect on a target (e.g., bullets and warheads).

The purpose of ammunition is to project a force against a selected target to have an effect (usually, but not always, lethal). An example of ammunition is the firearm cartridge, which includes all components required to deliver the weapon effect in a single package. Until the 20th century, black powder was the most common propellant used but has now been replaced in nearly all cases by modern compounds.

An airstrike, air strike, or air raid is an offensive operation against ground or sea surface targets carried out by aircraft, such as military balloons, airships, attack aircraft, bombers, gunships, attack helicopters and attack drones. The official definition of an airstrike includes all sorts of targets, including low-altitude air targets, but in popular usage the term is usually narrowed to a tactical (small-scale) strafing, missile strike or tactical bombing on a specific army, militia or naval position, as opposed to a larger, more generalized and indiscriminate attack against an entire area such as carpet bombing and strategic bombing.

Weapons used in an airstrike can range from aircraft-mounted direct-fire cannons and machine guns, rockets and air-to-surface missiles, to various types of aerial bombs (both unguided and guided), glide bombs, air-launched cruise missiles, and even directed-energy weapons such as laser weapons.

Self-propelled artillery (also called locomotive artillery) is artillery equipped with its own propulsion system to move toward its firing position. Within the terminology are the self-propelled gun, self-propelled howitzer, self-propelled mortar, and self-propelled rocket artillery. They are high-mobility vehicles, usually based on continuous tracks carrying either a large field gun, howitzer, mortar, or some form of rocket/missile launcher. They are usually used for long-range indirect bombardment support on the battlefield.

In the past, self-propelled artillery has included direct-fire vehicles, such as assault guns and tank destroyers, which were typically well-armoured vehicles often based upon the chassis of a tank. In lieu of the standard tank's general-purpose main gun that fired both high-explosive and anti-tank ammunition, direct-fire vehicles had specialized roles, with assault guns providing close fire-support for infantry and tank destroyers mounting an anti-tank gun to take on enemy armour.

A bombing range, sometimes referred to as an air weapons range (AWR), is a remote military facility used by combat aircraft for air-to-ground weapons training, as well as for the research, development, testing, and evaluation of aerial ordnance. These ranges support precision targeting with high-explosive aerial bombs, precision-guided munitions, rockets, missiles, and other aircraft-delivered weapons, in contrast to field firing ranges used by infantry and armored units.

To minimise environmental impact and infrastructure damage, various inert "practice bombs" are extensively used to simulate explosive ordnance during precision targeting exercises. In addition, solid target practice (TP) ammunition is employed during strafing runs, offering ballistic realism without explosive payloads, unlike high-explosive (HE) or armour-piercing (AP) variants which contain energetic fillers or penetrators designed for destructive effect.

Close air support (CAS) is defined as aerial warfare actions—often air-to-ground actions such as strafes or airstrikes—by military aircraft against hostile targets in close proximity to friendly forces. A form of fire support, CAS requires detailed integration of each air mission with fire and movement of all forces involved. CAS may be conducted using aerial bombs, glide bombs, missiles, rockets, autocannons, machine guns, and even directed-energy weapons such as lasers.

The requirement for detailed integration because of proximity, fires or movement is the determining factor. CAS may need to be conducted during shaping operations with special forces if the mission requires detailed integration with the fire and movement of those forces. A closely related subset of air interdiction, battlefield air interdiction, denotes interdiction against units with near-term effects on friendly units, but which does not require integration with friendly troop movements. CAS requires excellent coordination with ground forces, typically handled by specialists such as artillery observers, joint terminal attack controllers, and forward air controllers.

An airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) system is an airborne radar early warning system designed to detect aircraft, ships, vehicles, missiles and other incoming projectiles at long ranges, as well as performing command and control of the battlespace in aerial engagements by informing and directing friendly fighter and attack aircraft. AEW&C units are also used to carry out aerial surveillance over ground and maritime targets, and frequently perform battle management command and control (BMC2). When used at altitude, the radar system on AEW&C aircraft allows the operators to detect, track and prioritize targets and identify friendly aircraft from hostile ones in real-time and from much farther away than ground-based radars. Like ground-based radars, AEW&C systems can be detected and targeted by opposing forces, but due to aircraft mobility and extended sensor range, they are much less vulnerable to counter-attacks than ground systems.

AEW&C aircraft are used for both defensive and offensive air operations, and serve air forces in the same role as what the combat information center is to naval warships, in addition to being a highly mobile and powerful radar platform. So useful and advantageous is it to have such aircraft operating at a high altitude, that some navies also operate AEW&C aircraft for their warships at sea, either coastal- or carrier-based and on both fixed-wing and rotary-wing platforms. In the case of the United States Navy, the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye AEW&C aircraft is assigned to its supercarriers to protect them and augment their onboard command information centers (CICs). The designation "airborne early warning" (AEW) was used for earlier similar aircraft used in the less-demanding radar picket role, such as the Fairey Gannet AEW.3 and Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star, and continues to be used by the RAF for its Sentry AEW1, while AEW&C (airborne early warning and control) emphasizes the command and control capabilities that may not be present on smaller or simpler radar picket aircraft. AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) is the name of the specific system installed in the American Boeing E-3 Sentry and Japanese Boeing E-767 AEW&C airframes, but is often used as a general synonym for AEW&C.

An anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), anti-tank missile, anti-tank guided weapon (ATGW) or anti-armor guided weapon is a guided missile primarily designed to hit and destroy heavily armored military vehicles. ATGMs range in size from shoulder-launched weapons, which can be transported by a single soldier, to larger tripod-mounted weapons, which require a squad or team to transport and fire, to vehicle and aircraft mounted missile systems.

Earlier man-portable anti-tank weapons, like anti-tank rifles and magnetic anti-tank mines, generally had very short range, sometimes on the order of metres or tens of metres. Rocket-propelled high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) systems appeared in World War II and extended range to the order of hundreds of metres, but accuracy was low and hitting targets at these ranges was largely a matter of luck. It was the combination of rocket propulsion and remote wire guidance that made the ATGM much more effective than these earlier weapons, and gave light infantry real capability on the battlefield against post-war tank designs. The introduction of semi-automatic guidance in the 1960s further improved the performance of ATGMs.

Missile guidance is a field of engineering, specifically guidance, navigation and control, dealing with the control of missiles and guided bombs. Missile guidance systems are designed to maximize the reliability and accuracy of these weapons, by improving the likelihood they reach their target.

Guidance systems can be broadly divided into two categories: Go-onto-target (GOT) systems can be used against moving targets, and go-onto-location-in-space (GOLIS) systems attack fixed geographical positions.

A ballistic missile is a type of missile that follows a ballistic trajectory and is powered only during a relatively brief initial period—most of the flight is unpowered. Short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) typically stay within the Earth's atmosphere, while most larger missiles travel outside the atmosphere. The type of ballistic missile with the greatest range is an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The largest ICBMs are capable of full orbital flight.

These missiles are in a distinct category from cruise missiles, which are aerodynamically guided in powered flight and thus restricted to the atmosphere.

A rocket engine is a reaction engine, producing thrust in accordance with Newton's third law by ejecting reaction mass rearward, usually a high-speed jet of high-temperature gas produced by the combustion of rocket propellants stored inside the rocket. However, non-combusting forms such as cold gas thrusters and nuclear thermal rockets also exist. Rocket vehicles carry their own oxidiser, unlike most combustion engines, so rocket engines can be used in a vacuum, and they can achieve great speed, beyond escape velocity. Vehicles commonly propelled by rocket engines include missiles, artillery shells, ballistic missiles, fireworks and spaceships.

Compared to other types of jet engine, rocket engines are the lightest and have the highest thrust, but are the least propellant-efficient (they have the lowest specific impulse). For thermal rockets, pure hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, gives the highest exhaust velocity, but practical chemical rockets produce a mix of heavier species, reducing the exhaust velocity.

Fragmentation is the process by which the casing, shot, or other components of an anti-personnel weapon, bomb, barrel bomb, land mine, IED, artillery, mortar, tank gun, autocannon shell, rocket, missile, grenade, etc. are dispersed and/or shattered by the detonation of the explosive filler.

The correct term for those pieces is "fragments” (nicknamed “splinters” or “shards”). Preformed fragments can be of various shapes (spheres, cubes, rods, etc.) and sizes and are normally held rigidly within some form of matrix or body until the high explosive (HE) filling is detonated. The resulting high-velocity fragments produced by either method are the main lethal mechanisms of these weapons, rather than the heat or overpressure caused by detonation, although offensive grenades are often constructed without a frag matrix.

Safran S.A. (French pronunciation: [safʁɑ̃]) is a French multinational aerospace, defence and security corporation headquartered in Paris. It designs, develops and manufactures both commercial and military aircraft engines; launch vehicle, spacecraft and missile propulsion systems; as well as various other aerospace and military equipment and devices. The company was founded in 2005 through a merger between the aerospace engine manufacturer SNECMA and the electronics specialist SAGEM. Safran's subsequent acquisition of Zodiac Aerospace in 2018 significantly expanded its aeronautical activities.

Employing over 92,000 people and generating 27.31 billion euros in revenue in 2024, the company is listed on the Euronext stock exchange and is part of the CAC 40 and Euro Stoxx 50.