In military science, an attack is the aggressive attempt to conquer enemy territory, installations, personnel, or equipment or to deny the enemy the use of territory, installations, personnel, or equipment, for example by destroying the equipment. A defending force may defend themselves, surrender, or launch a counter-attack.

This term is also used with similar meaning in various games.

In audio and radio, attack is the reaction time of an envelope detector, such as in audio level compression or noise gates. The opposite is decay or falloff .

See also

• defense
• counterattack
• envelope (disambiguation)