Strategic Warfare: Why Target Prioritization Matters More Than Body Counts

Modern military operations increasingly reveal a critical conceptual error, prioritizing the number of destroyed targets over the achievement of concrete tactical and strategic objectives.

With rare historical exceptions like when one side possesses the capacity to destroy enemy forces at an industrial scale, wars are not won by body counts or strike tallies.

They are won through the systematic accomplishment of interlinked tactical tasks that degrade the enemy’s ability to fight. Such tasks may include disrupting logistical chains, systematically neutralizing command personnel, or degrading command-and-control structures.

When these efforts are sustained and targeted, they erode morale, fragment decision-making hierarchies, and create favorable conditions for-on operations and counterattacks.

This logic leads to a central proposal, the need for a flexible system of target prioritization that evaluates targets not in isolation, but in relation to higher-command objectives and the overarching operational plan.

Analysis of recent operational and strategic-level strikes, in the Ukraine Russia war, both mid-range and deep demonstrates a consistent pattern.

Success is determined not by the number of targets hit, but by whether those strikes produce measurable effects that alter enemy capabilities and enable subsequent actions.

1. Criteria for Operational Success

To meaningfully assess the success of any operation, three elements must be present.

A clearly defined goal, a well-understood cause-and-effect chain linking action to outcome.

A plan for consolidating the achieved effect, including neutralization of enemy countermeasures.

When an operation lacks a clear goal, operates under a vague or poorly defined objective, or is planned without understanding the consequences of its execution, even tactically successful strikes fail to translate into operational or strategic success.

In such cases, the operation devolves into inefficient resource expenditure rather than purposeful warfare.

2. Strikes on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea

The campaign targeting the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea offers a clear example of an operation with realistic, measurable goals.

These included protection of maritime shipping, reduction of platforms capable of launching cruise missiles, mitigation of amphibious assault threats, creation of favorable conditions for further operations.

Notably, the objective was likely not framed as the complete elimination of cruise missile threats.

This reflects realistic planning that accounted for Ukraine’s operational capabilities and anticipated enemy adaptation.

Russia responded by relocating ships to more protected ports and shifting launch procedures closer to piers.

Nevertheless, the primary operational goals were achieved, demonstrating effective alignment between objectives, means, and expected outcomes.

3. The Problem of Focus

In discussions surrounding the production of Shahed/Geran drones, attention frequently centers on striking individual facilities, such as the Alabuga site.

However, given Ukraine’s real-world capabilities, targeting a single node cannot form the foundation of a successful campaign unless it is embedded within a broader, systemic effort to disrupt the entire production cycle. A more rational approach is supply chain interdiction.

This logic can be illustrated through Karl Menger’s theory of goods, as outlined in Principles of Economics. Menger distinguishes between first-order goods, consumer goods that directly satisfy needs (the finished product).

Higher-order goods, production goods (second-order, third-order, and beyond) that enable the creation of first-order goods, such as raw materials, components, tools, processes, infrastructure, and labor.

The central principle is that a first-order good retains value only so long as the entire chain of higher-order goods and complementary systems remains intact.

Once the chain is disrupted, mass production of the final good becomes impossible, even if demand persists.

Applied to the current context, the enemy’s first-order good is the Shahed drone as a deployable weapon.

Higher-order goods include explosives, electronics, guidance systems, composite materials, machinery, skilled personnel, logistics networks, and energy supply.

Targeting critical nodes within this chain affects not a single product, but the enemy’s capacity to reproduce it at scale. Importantly, this is not a theoretical construct.

Ukraine has already demonstrated the capability to strike elements of the Shahed production ecosystem, including facilities and research centers associated with production, assembly, chemistry, and components.

Such as:

• The Basalt plant;
• The Dome plant;
• The Federal Research Center of Applied Chemistry
• The Krasnozavodsk Chemical Plant
• VNIIR-Progress.

The principal challenge is the absence of systematization. Without a sustained, long-term series of strikes against similar critical nodes, Russia retains the ability to compensate, rebuild logistics, relocate production, and establish redundancies.

It is the regularity and repetition of pressure across the production chain that generates cumulative effects capable of producing strategic outcomes.


4. A Logical Plan Undermined by an Unclear Goal

The July, August 2025 campaign targeting railway traction substations in Russia appeared, at first glance, to reflect coherent operational thinking, namely, degrading military logistics by disrupting energy supply to rail transport.

In practice, however, the campaign displayed clear indicators of insufficient strategic management, the absence of measurable, clearly articulated goals; an implicit focus on the act of destruction itself (“hitting the transformer”) rather than on system-level effects, a lack of synchronization and unified operational concept…

As a result, Russia not only adapted but adopted a systematic approach of its own, launching sustained strikes against Ukrainian railway nodes with clear logic and continuity.

Ukraine, by contrast, halted its campaign, as the lack of defined objectives made it impossible to determine success criteria, relevant metrics, or whether the achieved effect justified continuation.

This event underscores a recurring pattern, without a defined goal, any campaign is destined to dissolve into ambiguous metrics, loss of initiative, and strategic stagnation.

At the strategic level, the number of targets struck is not, in itself, a meaningful indicator of success.

A successful campaign is characterized by, accurate assessment of the post-strike condition of targets. Anticipation of the operational effects generated by each action; understanding of enemy responses and countermeasures. Iimplementation of measures to preserve and build upon achieved effects.

Strategic effectiveness emerges not from a checklist of destroyed targets, but from controlled, systematic pressure on the enemy’s operational system/ pressure that produces measurable change and creates space for subsequent actions.

Sasha | The Societal News Team 27JAN2026