Preventive attack

Preventive attack is a military doctrine in which an actor uses military force on an opponent that it considers as presenting a long-term threat. Such an opponent is not believed to be about to start offensive warfare; a spoiling attack to disrupt the preparations for offensive warfare is preemptive attack. Preemptive attack implies a response to an immediate danger. It is clearly not an act of immediate self-defense as defined by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. the National Security Strategy of the United States, as stated by the George W. Bush Administration, does consider preventive war as one of many grand strategic options against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The term suggests that the opponent has hostile intentions to the actor; simply attacking to seize land or resources is rarely considered prevention by objective observers, although propagandists may describe it as such. Japanese invasions of multiple locations in Asia, in 1941, were not seriously called preventive, but justified in that Japan needed the resources in the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, etc., for its own development.

While prevention is usually assumed to start from a condition of relevant peace, the term has been used to describe attacks against major capabilities of an overt opponent, such as the British attacks, in August 1943, against the German long-range guided missile development center at Peenemunde. This, of course, was within the context of an ongoing war, and indeed a larger operational plan against missile threat, Operation CROSSBOW.

In the contemporary context, the term has been applied to narrowly focused attacks against presumed weapons of mass destruction facilities, such as the 1981 Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor, under construction at Osirak. While WMD capability was one of the targets for the 2003 Iraq War, there were other factors such as generic regime change and support of terrorism. Some analysts do accept calling that attack preventive, while others do not.