Wordlab

Operation Spiderhole: With all the movie-making experience the Pentagon media moguls have under their gunbelts, such as this year's hits Saving Jessica's Privates and Thanksgiving Turkey in Baghdad, the Department of Disinformation still hasn't got a clue how to name military operations for the big screen.

Knowing they were about to capture the "Ace of Spades" in a mission that would surely be made into an Academy Award® winning Hollywood blockbuster by Steven Spielberg, starring Dubya's Republican guard Arnold Schwarzenegger, or at least a "direct to videoscope movie" for Fox News, the best name for the operation they could come up with was Red Dawn.

In an article so well written it could have been a post in Wordlab, Timothy Noah sums it up in Slate's "Chatterbox" Good Mission, Bad Name: "Why did they have to bring the movie Red Dawn into it?"

The tip-off that Operation Red Dawn was named deliberately after the movie is that the two hiding places scouted out by the combat team were code-named "Wolverine I" and "Wolverine II." (Saddam was found near Wolverine II.)

In 1984, when the USA was backing Saddam's war against Iran, the tagline for the movie Red Dawn was: In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now. In our time, no American army has occupied foreign soil. Until now. See the incongruity of the allusion? The Soviet Union is no more. This is Iraq, not Russia. This isn't Red Dawn II - The Hegemony Strikes Back.

A couple of years ago, in a Slate "Explainer" column, Emily Yoffe addressed the question we ask ourselves every time one of these code-named operations is announced. How does the military choose its code words?

In general, the first step is that a computer database of appropriately military sounding words spits out possible combinations, with each geographic command given rights to certain letters of the alphabet. The command overseeing the operation chooses candidates--after checking through a registry of previously used names--and sends it to the Joint Staff for review and approval. (The director of operations of the Joint Staff, Lt. General Gregory S. Newbold, has a name worthy of a military operation.) [Sept. 21 addition: It then goes to the Secretary of Defense who must endorse it.] It wasn't a brilliant algorithm that came up with the code word Desert Storm for the invasion of Iraq--that was deliberately chosen.

Winston Churchill, who personally vetted many of the British military code words, ordered that they should be neither overly boastful, nor frivolous. No mother, he wrote, should have to say "that her son was killed in an operation called 'Bunnybug.' "

It's been said before, but we'll say it again; the wordmongers at the Pentagram should check out Wordlab's Military Ops before they go off half-cocked in some operation without a proper name.

Posted by abnu on Wednesday, December 17, 2003 @ 8:48 PM [ + ]

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