Tools like osmosis, osmfilter, or osmconvert allow just clipping data to a defined bounding box or a polygon (besides filtering by attributes).
What is the best way to delete all objects inside multiple defined areas? In other words: I want do do an erase operation on OSM data. Is there a simpler way than importing OSM data to a database, processing there and writing back to a file?
You could use the approach outlined here: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/56269/how-to-cut-out-data-within-a-defined-polygon-with-osmosis
In your own poly file you use for filtering in osmconvert, osmium, etc, define a large polygon covering the whole area and substract each single military polygon by using an exclamation mark respectively. Check the Poly Filer File Format documentation for further details.
