I don’t understand why it would be “political hubris”.

Proper targeting is hard work. You need to map your enemy territory to make optimal choices. Not just in a geographical “what are the coordinates” sense, but also in a “what are the important nodes to get the coordinates for” sense. At the same time your enemy doesn’t want to be mapped and resists your efforts.

Doing this properly takes time. On the order of months. But once you are under attack you don’t have that time. So you have to select your targets ahead of time.

It is not because the missiles have limited memory. If they would have needed more memory they would have added more memory. It is because the President doesn’t have time once under attack to name each enemy railway depot one by one and decide which ones are important, and which ones are better left unharmed. Instead what they have is a menu of options. Something like option 1 destroy all red military ports, military airports and military bases; option 2 destroy major military installations plus main industrial centers; option 3 destroy main population centers.

Thinking that the memory allocation is why it is the way it is is super tech centered and quite frankly putting the cart before the horse.