There’s a string of recent comments centered around the very elastic nature of the word “terrorism” and what might be good working definitions starting here and interspersed with maybe the next ~15 posts:
As always, that thread has 3 or 4 strands of commentary running concurrently and can be a bit hard to follow after the fact. But the terrorism part might be relevant here.
Terrorism, IMO, is necessarily directed at civilians/non-combatants. This is a military base. Even if it is attacked by non-state actors, they would not be terrorists.
Or, what LHOD said
Yeah, that’s fair- I was looking back at that post and not feeling totally happy with it.
I think there’s a pragmatic element - any state will have one set of institutions set up to deal with traditional military threat and another to deal with terrorism, so for the sake of giving the job to the right people, labelling " a crew of apparent civilians are planning to use the methods of terrorists groups to attack this target" as terrorism is in practical terms the right decision because it’s the counter-terrorism tools that will be needed.
But LHOD’s question was about legitimacy, not threat response, so from that perspective it’s more about the nature of the target as you both say. Military bases are obviously military targets (and it’s not like e.g in WWII the Allies didn’t benefit from the Resistance attacking such targets); there’s a fuzzy line with e.g. factories supplying to both civilian and military customers, water plants serving the base and the nearby town etc. but that isn’t this.
In legal terms, the UK has shown itself willing to charge people attacking the supply line with terrorism offences, so I wouldn’t like to rely on the above too much if it came to court.
Terrorism is almost certainly the wrong term for an attack against a military target like this, but the usage of civilians as patsies in an attack is a war crime in its own right.
Not that this really matters. Iran butchers their own civilians by the tens of thousands; in comparison, this hardly moves the needle on their evil-meter by one iota.
The issue here is less the specific tactics employed by Iran and more the fact that the tactics are being employed by one of the most evil regimes in the world today.
Assuming they did intend to damage USAF stuff and they were paid by the Iranian government they are “mercenary saboteurs”.
Sabotage is certainly an internationally legal aspect or tactic of war. The international legal framework around mercenaries is all over the map. Used to be a war crime, not really any more.