Some useful acronyms by which to understand 21st century conflict:
COIN: Counter Insurgency. Employed by ISAF in Afghanistan from 2003-2010. Broadly speaking, the strategy wherein a friendly force competes with an enemy force for the allegiance and support of a largely-neutral population. Unattractive to militaries because of the numerous paradoxes involved in successfully pursuing the strategy. Very attractive to democracies and advocates of human rights as, ideally, COIN involves pitting humanism and liberal, western ideas against some competing philosophy, and we’d rather believe that, properly marketed, our system will defeat any competing system.
CT: Counter Terror. Employed by ISAF in Afghanistan from 2010-present. Employed around the world by America. Championed most vocally by Vice President Joe Biden. The strategy wherein intelligence (gathered directly by humans or by technological means) identifies actual or potential terrorist threats to the U.S.A. or any of its allies (or strategic interests, including Russia and China), and that terrorist threat is neutralized. With a bomb or a gun. “Taken off the board.” AKA “whack-a-mole” for its apparent ineffectiveness.
DEVGRU: Seal Team Six.
GWOT: Global War on Terror. The Bush Administration’s term for the overarching foreign policy strategy that included OEF (the war in Afghanistan) and OIF (the war in Iraq). Intentionally imprecise.
GCO: Global Contingency Operations. The Obama Administration’s term for the overarching foreign policy strategy that includes OEF (the war in Afghanistan), and the unnamed operations in Africa, Pakistan, throughout South America and Europe and Southeast Asia. Terrifyingly, even broader and somehow more vague than GWOT.
ISAF: International Security Assistance Force. The group of mostly-NATO countries helping Afghanistan transition from tribal society into modern democracy. Also jokingly known as “I Saw Americans Fighting” among Scandinavian ISAF members.
OEF: Operation Enduring Freedom. The war in Afghanistan.
OIF: Operation Iraqi Freedom. The war in Iraq.
SOCOM: Special Operations Command (the command, now basically obsolete, responsible for organizing Delta, Rangers, Seals, and Special Forces).
TF -: Task Force [blank] – depending on the context, either a Battalion or Brigade-size effort, or a much smaller higher-echelon group of former SOCOM-affiliate soldiers performing deniable missions for which there are no names.
In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay about the way politics was impacting the ways in which people used language. The basic idea was that unscrupulous people who had things to hide were manipulating how we communicated in order to deceive us into supporting people or policies that we would not otherwise want to support. That politicians lie was not a new idea in 1946, and is not surprising today. In a world with enough thermonuclear energy to destroy most life above cockroaches, though, the stakes are a great deal higher.
Orwell refined the ideas he expressed in 1946, and published them in a more broad fashion in 1984, when he described the language of “Newspeak.” The language (a revision of English undertaken by a totalitarian state apparatus) would shift the way people thought by channeling their ability to express certain thoughts in public, the way they exchanged information. Reading “Politics and the English Language” and 1984, it’s not difficult to see how Orwell’s ideas about thinking and language had evolved. Orwell believed strongly in the potential of democracy and humanism to create morally responsible, ethical, civic-minded individuals, and put his life on the line to that end in the Spanish Civil War, receiving a throat wound that kept him off the front lines of the Second World War.
One of the most important and relevant intellectual legacies that George Orwell bequeathed us was this idea that, either with or without malice, institutions routinely and deliberately attempt to shape public thought through language. Nowhere is that more apparent today than in the successive American Presidential Administrations responsible for beginning what we call the “Global War on Terror” (the Bush Administration) and expanding the definition and bureaucratic entrenchment of that war (the Obama Administration). Both Administrations make heavy, almost exclusive use of acronyms to describe every aspect of the conflict, from the weapons used, to the agencies involved, to the nature and scope of the military actions. Orwell would recognize the current “Global Contingency Operations” (GCO) as the apogee of post-modern “Newspeak” in action – a war that is made up of “contingency operations,” less police action than police-intention, less of an effort and more of an idea. Something slippery, hopelessly slick, around which no counter-argument can be mustered.
The acronyms are constantly changing. When I got to Afghanistan, the Taliban were called “ACM,” or “Anti-Coalition Militia.” Eight months later, they became “AAF,” or “Anti-Afghan Forces.” A single fighter was a “MAM” or “Military-Aged Male,” though many of the soldiers called them “FAGs,” or “Fighting Aged Guys.” As earlier pointed out, GWOT morphed into GCO sometime mid-2010. The CIA, with too much baggage, has lost much of its actual importance to various TFs, the NSA, DEA, DIA, and DHS, which in their turn will likely change acronyms over the coming years.
The enemy carried AKs and PKMs and RPGs, while we carried M4s, AT4s, M240Bs, SAWs and M4-mounted 203s, which were later swapped out for 320s. HIMARS is good, but getting a GOMAR is bad, although one of the finest, most scrupulous officers I ever served with went on record saying that if you got out of combat without a CIB and a GOMAR, you hadn’t done your job properly, a commentary on the higher-level leadership in the Army’s unreliability and essential disconnect from events on the ground. One cannot understand the military without speaking its acronyms fluently–and each military branch has a separate set of acronyms, some so different as to be mutually unintelligible.
In short – to wage war on the side of justice and good (America, the west, humanism), one must first master a shifting language of words and acronyms which themselves change every few years or so. I can testify from personal experience that the effort involved in mastering that language is great, especially when one is actually in combat (and therefore not incentivized to do anything with one’s energy save decipher the enemy’s intentions). Mastering military-speak is the first step in confronting the realities of the war – one cannot effectively protest or criticize without understanding what it is one is protesting or criticizing. If one lacks the proper words by which to challenge a given political institution – especially when it is in the institution’s interests to keep the nature of its goals and efforts obscure – one will simply rail away in a vacuum, doomed to appear to be protesting the last war, or some archaic problem that is irrelevant.
This is why the long-haired Vietnam-era protester seems so sad, so overmatched – he’s saying “no war,” to which statement the Obama Administration can correctly say “we never declared war, but Iraq, which was begun on false premises by the Bush Administration, has been closed down,” and ignore the ongoing engagement in Afghanistan, and the ubiquitous worldwide “Counter-Terror” operations targeting, among others, American citizens. College students and idealists who feel – correctly! – that we should be more careful about how much information we allow our government to collect have to sift through layers of obfuscation before they uncover an acronym – NSA? Not CIA, or DHS? – that gives them an entity, literally an agency against which to argue, with which to dispute.
And why, why does any of this matter? Because every political administration understands that if they were to place a new agency inside the Pentagon and advertise it by its true name – in the case of the NSA, for example, the “Office of Monitoring Everything Anyone Does Online to Profile and Preempt Terrorist Attacks,” there would presumably be a great deal of blowback. While some polls seem to indicate that a majority of Americans support sacrificing a certain amount of privacy to security, it’s not clear to me whether Americans would support such a program or agency – supposing that the majority of the population agrees that one should trump the other, we could have (given knowledge of the NSA’s programs) collectively agreed to discuss our way ahead as a nation. Even the CIA – the “Central Intelligence Agency,” which I will use as an umbrella acronym for those acronyms I should not divulge to the public in the interests of national security, could at this point more accurately be called the “CIA / DDSAT,” or Central Intelligence Agency / Department of Drone Strikes Against Terrorists.” Again, if the public had understood – understood, that we had kill teams in many third world countries, and were targeting individual human beings for assassination, oftentimes based on patterns of behavior, there probably would have been a spirited debate on the subject. These actions were not kept secret, but were buried beneath an avalanche of acronyms and double-speak. Newspeak, in fact.
One should not have to offer one’s credentials or explain one’s love of country when making such a statement, but it still feels obligatory. In an intellectual atmosphere where substance is more important than words, I have to point out that I believe, like Orwell, so strongly in the potential for good in the west and our cultural tradition that I went to war, twice, for it – OEF VIII and OEF X (it may have been XI, I never got a clear answer on that). I believe that my country, a part of the cultural legacy of Kant and Plato, is an especially permissive and forgiving country in which to be a journalist and thinker, and despite the vitriol with which intellectuals are attacked from both the left and the right (the Williamsburg Hipsters on the one hand who see no wrong in President Obama, and the Fox News / Rush Limbaugh apologists on the right who see no wrong with anything the Neocons say or do), you can still live freer here than in any other large country of which I’m aware in the world. We can do better, though, as citizens – we should expect better from our government. Obfuscation and deceit are rife within our political community, and should be done away with. We must begin calling things by their true names again, and if we don’t like how they look on paper – we need to be more responsible about how we exercise our global citizenship. On this, Orwell would agree.
Adrian B
Great article, Adrian. The twentieth and twenty-first century seem to have not only created singularly amorphous enemies (terror, drugs, etc), but also equally amorphous entities to fight those abstractions. As far as naming mechanisms, do you think they are essentially the same between the last two presidents? From my view, under Bush, it seems we fought Terror and brought Enduring Freedom to places. Anyone with the slightest hint of sophistication in his or her bones should have cringed at this (it is a testament to the power of 9/11 that the majority of our nation did not). But the Obama era technocratism uses words like “contingency operations,” which strikes me as vastly more bureaucratic and well in line with the CIAs (and America’s) clandestine history, to purposely whitewash morality. Do you think one better than the other, or just different sides of the same coin? Personally, I’m torn. It strikes me as sentimental, illogical and politically dangerous to apply vague moralistic terms to power politics, but I suppose someone might argue that this is better than obscuring assassinations and coups in a bunch of legalistic jargon and red tape, as has been the case since at least the Second World War.
How can you forget the infamous “collateral damage”? I am reminded of that scene in “Full Metal Jacket” when the Stars and Stripes editor casually passes on the directive that they have changed the appropriate phrase from “Search and Destroy” to “Sweep and Clear”.For my part, I am more concerned when the “truth” is buried under vague language or euphemisms rather than omitted. This is something that applies to the field of history as well, since, in a way, today’s journalism becomes tomorrow’s history.
Another issue about manipulation of language and use of euphemism is the political sphere, where the Republican Party, however toxic their ideas, seem to always be on the linguistic offensive (in more ways than one). The linguist George Lakoff has especially written much on the topic of how language can be a battlefield, and whoever seizes the upper ground has the initiative.
Mike, “terror” and “freedom” are two words that have almost lost their meaning in America in the last decade, if they ever had one. In all likelihood, those two words have always been quite relativistic to own’s perspective.
You are definitely right to call the use of “freedom” and “terror” relativistic since the word themselves were coined. Check out Montaigne’s “On Barbarians” for a great satire on European attempts to “free” the American natives of their terrifying barbarism. And I recently learned of a short-lived Republic of Fredonia in East Texas while driving through the area. About ten years before the more successful Texas rebellion, a bunch of Tennessee and Mississippi slave owners claimed a section of what was then Mexico free of Mexican terror. I guess what surprised me – and surprises me still – about the second Bush administration’s language is the complete throwing over of subtlety and irony, not the originality of their efforts. For someone growing up in the 90’s, irony was part of the air one breathed; to see how quickly it fell to the wayside by those “with the initiative,” as you say, in a moment of crises speaks to the inherent weaknesses of the ironic outlook (as least as a moral posture), as well as the way in which words must be perpetually battled over.
Irony itself is generally not the type of language used by either conservatives or the holders of power, so I am a bit surprised by your surprise. I’m not sure about the existence of a weakness of the ironic outlook, just of a lack of worthy practitioners. I think one of the underlying issues is the blatant success of the long-term corporate and conservative holy grail of stultifying the population while keeping them fat and happy with panem et circenses. In this type of environment, euphemisms such as Adrian has listed are able to flourish, and subtlety and irony diminish. Satire taken literally by a credulous and uncritical citizenry becomes commonplace.
You’re right. Those in direct political power seldom use irony. But those directly below those in power love irony. It makes the corporate system you refer to flourish so people can do terrible things without having to take responsibility for those terrible things. This argument is usually applied to soldiers. I studied it in the writing of First World War officers back in the days when I wanted to be a historian. But I think it could be applied to our capitalist world as a whole. The bourgeoisie know exploitation is going on – we can thank the media for periodic reports of this at least – yet they do not want to take responsibility for it because that would mean giving up the fruits of exploitation: cars, television, marble-countered kitchens, etc. Irony fills in that gap. This, as you point out, is not true irony, not Richard Rorty Ironic Pragmatism, and thus not worthy of being called irony. I absolutely agree with you. But I think it dangerous to simply ignore how effective little irony (as opposed to Irony) can be as a conservative force. In my experience, everyone makes fun of the euphemisms, just as everyone made fun of them in Orwell’s time, and then a surprising number of these same people (hence my reaction to the post-9/11 world) proceed to embrace euphemism out of a strange mixture of credulousness and hyper-criticality, or subtlety and boredom. Maybe we can call one sarcasm and the other irony, or make a philosophical distinction between irony and Irony as I did above, but this strikes me as an un-ironic Manichean cop out. In my opinion, we need to think harder about how irony can fail people as much it can help them.
Nice response, Mike. I like this distinction between big (philosophical) Irony and little (conservative) irony within the corporate-owned and operated system. Major points for mentioning Richard Rorty and his use of Irony as a positive force; I have actually been recently working through his oeuvre after discovering him a while back and realizing he might be my new favorite contemporary philosopher. Let’s move forward with some of these ideas in the future.
I came across an article that discusses some of these points about the corruption of language for political means. Interesting read:http://truth-out.org/news/item/19296-empire-under-obama-part-1-political-language-and-the-mafia-principles-of-international-relations