: how are bombs dropped from a bomber aircraft able to strike their targets so precisely without risking hitting any civilian infrastructure
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The idea that bombs are precision weapons didn’t really exist before the first gulf war. The Americans went to a lot of effort to create and distribute videos showing precision strikes. There wasn’t a news station on Earth that wasn’t showing videos of a crosshair on a rapidly expanding rooftop and then blackness as the bomb impacted on target.
Precision bombing was sold to us as the most moral and compassionate way to wage a war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were violently killed but we didn’t know that at the time. We were shown laser guided bombs blowing up buildings. We were deliberately distanced from associating human casualty with what was being shown on TV. Which I think has led to the idea that precision bombing is the norm and that civilian infrastructure is not really at risk.
As for the technical side, the bombs can change direction after they are dropped, i.e they don’t fall ballistically. They aim for *something* and alter their trajectory so that the bomb maintains it’s aim. That something can be a point of light. It can be a GPS coordinate. It can be a radio transmission. It just needs to be something that the bomb can identify.
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