Modern Targeting in European Militaries

On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel launched a massive strike operation against Iran. The US’s Operation Epic Fury carried out strikes at a sustained tempo not seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with some reports claiming that nearly 900 strikes were carried out in the first 12 hours. This scale of targeting was only possible through the collation and cohering of decades of data points from a myriad of sources that both enabled hundreds of strikes in a matter of hours and facilitated hundreds of daily strikes for the following five weeks.

The scale and tempo of the strikes demonstrate the centrality of targeting to modern operations, continuing a trend that has been seen in Ukraine and recent Israeli operations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen. Various countries, including the UK, have made an increase in their targeting capabilities core to their force modernisation and enhancement initiatives, with one European general describing their desire to identify 3,000 targets per day.

Much of the public attention focuses on the technical means of enabling such capabilities, especially the methods and platforms that integrate the disparate data streams into targeteers’ workflows. For example, the Israelis use systems that ‘bank’ targets ahead of a conflict, with AI-enabled databases tracking and updating thousands of targets, while the US famously uses Palantir’s Maven Smart System to host, manage and even automate their targeting workflows. This approach to modern targeting envisages a deep integration of intelligence collection and strike systems across a joint force, such as the US Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept. The connection of any sensor, any decider and any effector seamlessly across all domains remains more a guiding vision than an operational reality, despite significant developments in multi-domain integration in Ukraine and the Iran war.

Far less attention has been given to the organisational, procedural and human elements of modern targeting, despite the changes in processes, procedures and organisational culture required by the adoption of large-scale, digitalised integration enablers. This paper seeks to fill this gap, describing modern targeting while detailing its non-technical considerations for both policymakers and practitioners. It is bounded by a focus on European capability, especially UK capability, and aims to inform human, policy and procedural considerations around the implementation of the UK’s Digital Targeting Web (DTW).

The paper begins with a description of targeting grounded in traditional doctrine, then outlines what targeting comprises from policy, procedural and operational perspectives. The second section illustrates the operational challenges presented in high intensity, near-future conflict between British and Russian forces, especially in sensing, finding and prioritising targets if the joint force is digitally integrated. The third section frames the frictions – both theoretical and observed – in modern targeting, especially those arising from decision compression and automation.