Surgical strike
precise military attack
A surgical strike is a military attack which is intended to damage only a legitimate military target, with no or minimal collateral damage to surrounding structures, vehicles, buildings, or the general public infrastructure and utilities.
Description
A swift and targeted attack with the aim of minimum collateral damage to the nearby areas and civilians is a surgical strike. Neutralization of targets with surgical strikes also prevents escalation to a full-blown war. Surgical strike attacks can be carried out via air strike, airdropping special ops teams or a swift ground operation or by sending special troops.
Precision bombing is another example of a surgical strike carried out by aircraft – it can be contrasted against carpet bombing, the latter which results in high collateral damage and a wide range of destruction over an affected area which may or may not include high civilian casualties. The bombing of Baghdad during the initial stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US forces, known as "shock and awe" is an example of a coordinated surgical strike, where government buildings and military targets were systematically attacked by US aircraft in an attempt to cripple the Ba'athist controlled Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein.
Examples
Azerbaijan
On 14 October 2020, during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan carried out surgical strikes against Armenian forces and destroyed three R-17 Elbrus tactical ballistic missile launchers in Kalbajar District, de jure part of Azerbaijan, but under de facto independent Artsakh's control. According to Azerbaijan, the missile launchers had been targeting Ganja and Mingachevir, and the strike was in retaliation of the 11 October Ganja ballistic missile attack, which resulted in ten civilians getting killed and 40 more getting injured, with women and children being among the victims. Armenia confirmed that sites within Armenia had been struck while continuing to deny it had attacked Azerbaijan.
Israel
Israel's Entebbe raid in 1976, through which Israeli passengers were freed from a hijacked plane that landed in Uganda, is considered a successful surgical strike.
“Surgical strike” enters the record as precise military attack. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Surgical, strike and precise can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q336710. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2020 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Surgical strike” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.