The phrase "aiming to inflict" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing an intention or goal to cause harm or damage to someone or something.
Example: "The group was aiming to inflict significant damage on the enemy's infrastructure during the operation."
Alternatives: "intending to cause" or "seeking to impose".
They aim to inflict maximum death and terror in an initial unprovoked attack.
Instead, suicide bombings have aimed to inflict maximum damage on Iraqi institutions like the police and military that are central to the American effort to turn over the reins of government by June 30.
Meanwhile in the Standard, Fiona Mountford aims to inflict some deeper pain on the show's creators by describing it as "a frantic, unlovely production that does what all insecure creatures do and talks incessantly without pausing for thought".
To those two familiar problems we can add one more: Can retributivists make sense of punishments that do not aim to inflict suffering, but that reflect the idea that a wrongdoer's particular acts make her unfit to retain certain rights going forward?
These plagues aim to inflict psychological rather than physical harm.
With the summer campaign of 1965, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces aimed to inflict significant losses on the South Vietnamese military.
The instigator of the Second World War, the frustrated watercolorist Adolf Hitler, had aimed both to inflict this on his enemies and to preserve his own Thousand-Year Reich from the possibility of such ruination by ordering all new public buildings to be constructed solely in brick and stone.
By filing a so-called prepackaged bankruptcy plan, CIT is aiming to limit the damage inflicted on the scores of retailers and other companies that depend on the specialized financing it provides.
Here, for example, are the consequences of Operation Gomorrah, the raids on Hamburg in midsummer 1943 whose aim was to inflict "maximum destruction on the city and reduce it to ashes": "Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere.
Whether combatants like to admit it or not, the mindset required to participate is one of unbridled aggression and the aim is to inflict physical harm on an opponent.
