Traditional multicast routing strategies can hardly meet the demanding requirements of multicasting mission assignment messages in airborne tactical networks. This letter proposes an intent‐driven routing strategy, termed as IDR, to realize reliable and efficient multicast. IDR exploits bit index explicit replication technique to encode not only the destination information but also the retransmission information into packet headers. If part of the multicast members failed to receive the packet, IDR can perceive the error and retransmit the packet to the precise set of nodes. Compared to the state‐of‐the‐art reliable multicast routing methods, IDR can enhance multicast retransmission success rate by about 10% or more and reduce retransmission overhead by around 50%.