Raid (military)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A raid is an attack into enemy territory for a specific purpose, with no intent to gain or hold terrain, and where the unit returns to friendly territory immediately after the attack. Generally, a raid is brief and performed by a small unit composed of commandos or irregulars.

A raid may be conducted to demoralize, confuse, or exhaust an enemy, to ransack a camp, to obtain or destroy goods, to free POWs, to kill or capture people important to an enemy force, or to gather intelligence. Raids are especially common in guerrilla warfare.

The Royal Air Force used this word in the Second World War to refer to an air attack, either by one aircraft or many squadrons, against all manner of targets on the ground or aircraft defending them in the air. This was rather than the word "battle", which was used for land, sea, or amphibious conflict. The key was that raids were planned ahead of time. Aircraft patrols against U-Boats were not called raids, nor were the emergency launches of carrier aircraft against recently detected enemy ships.