The war in Iraq and the meaning of words
Posted by kitty on March 28, 2003
In Reply to: The war in Iraq and the meaning of words posted by James Briggs on March 28, 2003
: : The following appeared in the Times of Friday 28 March. I thought it worth copying.
: : How to follow
the granularity when blues go kinetic
: : By David Charter, Central Command,
Qatar
: : THE war started with 'decapitation', then switched to 'shock and awe'.
Every campaign spawns its own lexicon and the Iraq conflict will be no exception.
Most buzzwords will be common parlance only in the mess, but others will become
familiar. The 1991 Gulf War gave us Scuds, one of Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction',
and Saddam's threatened 'mother of all battles'.
: : Now we have America's
Moab. The massive ordnance airburst bomb, a satellite-guided missile with a mushroom
cloud, has been nicknamed the 'mother of all bombs', as if to beat Saddam at his
own linguistic game.
: : Some phrases seem designed to sanitise war? think
of daisy-cutters in Vietnam, which sounded gentle but sent shrapnel flying indiscriminately.
The first Gulf War brought us 'friendly fire', used to mask the horror of killing
your own troops by mistake. In this war the military will use the phrase, but
prefers to talk of 'blue-on-blues', from planning maps showing the good guys in
blue and the enemy in red.
: : The 1991 conflict also gave us 'collateral damage', chilling military jargon for killing innocents, and 'human shields',
phrases destined to return despite greater use of 'precision bombing' of 'kinetic
targets' (military facilities).
: : First news of the fighting is being reported
by journalists 'embedded' with coalition forces, a phrase suggesting just how
close the relationship is between 'embeds' and troops, but which may come to mean
a link that is a little too cosy.
: : If people flee attacks, they become
'dislocated civilians' (refugees), but then they will avoid the 'fibua', fighting
in built-up areas. Only a grasp of 'granularity' (fine detail) will help the coalition
to 'invest' (attack) in Saddam's 'smez' (super missile engagement zone, an area
south of Baghdad protected by layer upon layer of different guns and mortars).
When coalition troops 'go kinetic' (attack) and lose their lives in the course
of 'servicing' (destroying) a target, their commanding officers have the unpleasant
duty of 'kinforming': telling their relations.
: : Aircrew in Iraqi airspace
refer to 'sausage side', the area where they turn the 'non-friendlies' into sausages.
Ground troops, on the other hand, belittle Iraqi defences as 'speed bumps'.
: Sadly, the software turned all the original quotation marks into question marks. However, it's still legible.
All the war talk is starting to sound like some sort of science fiction movie, leaning more and more towards something like Demolition Man...