The difficulty in destroying a major bridge with cruise or ballistic missiles lies in the fundamental mismatch between the physics of a missile warhead's explosion and the structural mechanics of bridge construction.
The common perception ("a missile hits – the bridge collapses") assumes that a bridge behaves like a regular building. Therefore, it should collapse in the same way, like a structure with enclosed spaces.
However, this is not the case. Any well-designed and properly constructed bridge is an open, resilient, and highly redundant engineering system.
Furthermore, it's important to distinguish between the complete destruction of a bridge and its being rendered unusable.
The most obvious result of a hit is often the destruction of a section of the road or railway surface.
However, the surface is only one element of the bridge system. Beneath it are longitudinal and transverse beams, trusses, box girders, supporting structures, and other elements that directly bear the load.
Therefore, it is possible for a situation to arise where traffic on the bridge is impossible or severely restricted, but the bridge span itself remains standing.
This is where the important distinction lies between a temporary or prolonged loss of the bridge's transportation function and its complete physical destruction.
A large bridge (such as the Southern Bridge in Kiev) can withstand significant localized damage because its load-bearing system is distributed over a large area and, in many designs, has substantial redundancy.
However, this does not mean that strikes on bridges are practically useless.
For military logistics, it is often not necessary to physically drop the span into the river. It is often sufficient to achieve a state where heavy vehicles or trains cannot be safely transported across the structure, and restoring it requires significant time and engineering resources.
🔴@DDGeopolitics