Rosetta Stone: Pentagonese

Ok, you've been introduced to Pentagonese. You've seen some specimens living in the wild. You've heard about the obscure doctrinal quibbling at the dark center of all of the Pentagon's lexicographic debate. Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle sta... uh, fake software package*:

The fine photoshopping work you see above comes courtesy of Caitlin Fitzgerald, she of Clausewitz for Kids and Gunpowder and Lead fame. She's a real artiste. I was sure I'd posted this several months ago when she ginned it up for me, but a search of the archives reveals that my memory has failed us all yet again.

In any event, enjoy (and don't sue me).

* Seriously, this is fake. Don't sue me.

Semantically Ignorant Comic Irony of the Day, "bang for the buck" edition

Les Gelb published an article in the November/December 2010 Foreign Affairs entitled "GDP Now Matters More than Force: A U.S. Foreign Policy for the Age of Economic Power" ($). The thesis is simple: American foreign policy must be reoriented if we are to remain successful and secure in a world where states and their citizens care more about economic matters than about military might. Gelb ties up his introduction with what must've seemed to him quite a charming turn of phrase:

Having overlooked profound changes in the world, U.S. leaders have done little to modernize their national security strategy. Present U.S. strategy offers too little bang for its buck because there is not enough buck in the strategy.

(I've added the emphasis above.)

What's he trying to say here, do you think? One could easily suffer some confusion at Gelb's glibness, especially if the excerpt is taken out of context: couldn't that sentence have indicated that U.S. strategy is failing because we're not spending enough money? But considering the rest of the article, I reckon Gelb means that American "strategy" is getting an insufficient return (as measured in "security," presumably) on "investment" because our foreign policy fails to sufficiently account for the importance of economics and economic power in international relations. We're focusing too much cash and attention on our military machine and neglected economic strength, he seems to suggest.

Which, ok, maybe right, maybe not, but to use the expression "bang for the buck" to illustrate it? Downright hilarious.

That phrase was first used in an idiomatic sense by Charles Erwin Wilson, Secretary of Defense to President Eisenhower and post-Korea Pentagon budget-cutter. He was explaining the rationale for the policy of "massive retaliation," in which even limited provocations by the Soviets might be met with an overwhelming American nuclear response. The doctrine was codified in 1953's NSC 162/2 (pdf), which asserted that "the security of the United States requires development and maintenance of a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power." Proponents of the "New Look" defense policy thought the destructive power of nuclear weapons -- and a stated willingness to use them -- could counterbalance the Soviets' overwhelming conventional military superiority and save the U.S. the outrageous sums it might otherwise pour into the maintenance of innumerable maneuver formations.

"More bang for the buck" was one of those rare idioms that means exactly what it says: by building our security policy around nukes, we figured to get more destruction for less money.

Gelb seems to want us to believe that international relations have evolved to the point that we simply don't need as much bang these days, so we ought to be spending less bucks. Whether or not you agree with him, you've got to admit his formulation was a miserable (if funny) failure.

...begging the question, "why does the military hate English?"

Aw, isn't this cute? The J-7 is worried about inter-service communication!

Over 25 years after the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 mandated "jointness," Service personnel still sometimes struggle to communicate with one another during joint operations. No doubt there has been marked improvement, but there is room for more.

Maybe they should instead worry about the individual services developing internally consistent, sensible lexicons instead of proliferating idiotic, poorly-defined, valueless terms like "building partner capacity."

Also: There's no small irony in the fact that a journal article premised on the contention that "words matter" includes this howler:

White cap and wave were defined in JP 1–02 almost exactly as they are in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, begging the question of their utility as entries. [emphasis added]

That's NOT WHAT "BEGGING THE QUESTION" MEANS, BRO. (See here for deets.)

Good thing we're all guided by the mantra "precise terms used precisely"!

If I meet Burt Reynolds, I'll shake his hand for you*

It's official: Ink Spots is famous.

Ok, not really. But Danger Room is famous, and they linked over here, so we're getting pretty good play this afternoon. Noah Shachtman emailed me a couple of weeks ago, right after I'd inaugurated the "Learn to Speak Pentagon" series, and asked if I would write a "Pentagonese primer" for them. So I kicked around a few ideas and threw something together... and then Egypt happened, and the defense blogosphere's attention justifiably shifted elsewhere. In the meantime, I've held off on Lesson 3 until Danger Room had a chance to run the piece, but it's up now and I don't want you guys to think I've abandoned the theme.

Go read: "Pentagonese: A Primer"

I went through two versions of this to hone in on the sort of thing Noah was looking for, so here's the stuff he didn't use as a kind of bonus DVD.

Downrange ­– An operational theater or combat zone. Often synonymous with “the ‘Box,” or “the Sandbox” (though these beachier forms can be Iraq-specific, too). Never paired with a specific geographic reference, so you won’t hear “downrange in Afghanistan.”

• “We have to reschedule the VTC next month – the general’s going downrange.”

Fidelity and Granularity – This pairing illustrates the characteristic Pentagonese phenomenon of using two distinct and relatively uncommon standard English words to mean the same very specific thing – in this case, “details.”

• “No sir, we, uh, we don’t have enough fidelity on that to give you a good answer at this time” or “we need to get a bit more granularity on the resources piece before we can move out on this.”

Kinetic – Lethal, violent, traditional. Contrasted with “non-kinetic actions,” a neologism coined to better elaborate the sort of mindset shift encapsulated by the publication of a handbook entitled “The Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System.” (Money is a decidedly non-kinetic “weapons system.”) This is the part with the shooting.

• “We can dominate the kinetic fight, but if we can’t protect the people, we’ll lose.”

Metrics – What DoD uses to assess situations, evaluate activities, and measure progress. Metrics are used to demonstrate rigor and obtain granularity. “Munitions expended in the calendar month” might be a metric – so too might something fuzzier and more subjective like “districts under government control.” Typically reflective of the military’s efforts to make qualitative judgments through the collection of quantitative data, metrics must be established in order to populate stoplight charts.

• “We need to work up some metrics so we can show the Boss we’re doing something out here. Can’t you get me a number for the hearts and minds we’ve won, or something?”

OBE – “Overtaken by events;” no longer valid as a result of a change in circumstances. If you sent your wife an email about all the awesome things the two of you were gonna do together when you got out of the Army, and then you got stop-lossed the next day, you might say that communication was OBE. Exclusively employed in the Building as an acronym/initialization.

• “All those recommendations you made are OBE, man – didn’t you read the paper this morning?”

Offline ­– A mystifyingly general term meaning something like “in another venue.” Usually part of a suggestion to expedite a meeting by “taking this up offline.” If you’re on a VTC, offline could mean on the phone; if you’re in a conference room, it may mean a one-on-one sidebar. Contrary to expectations, offline never means “not on the internet.”

• “I don’t want to hold up the group, so me and Colonel Jones can talk offline.”

Out of my lane – Beyond the limits of one’s expertise or area of professional responsibility. Almost always employed as a sort of disclaimer when weighing in on something you don’t know a damn thing about.

• “I’m just a dumb infantry guy, so this is out of my lane, but if you ask me we ought to be getting out in front of this Egypt thing.”

Optics – How something looks to outside observers. Rarely considered by personnel in the field; when you come to The Building, before you do anything you’ve got to be aware of the optics. “How it looks” in regular civilian-speak.

• “This thing is sensitive on the Hill, so before we announce anything we’ve got to sit down and think about the optics.”

Scratch the itch – Yet another of the military’s overused idiomatic expressions, this one is pretty self-explanatory: to satisfy a stated need. Notable more for frequency of use than for being particular obscure or nonsensical.

• “We’ve got a few outstanding media requests on this, so I need to you to go ahead and scratch the itch and put this one to bed.”

TTPs – Tactics, techniques, and procedures. A collection of methods for performing a particular task. TTPs are a way of doing business – they’re how doctrinal principles are translated into action.

• “If you want to get a look at TTPs and best practices for end-running Congress on budgets, pay attention to what the SECDEF’s been up to.”

* Anyone who can tell me the genesis of this title without Googling wins a free Ink Spots t-shirt** and my everlasting admiration.

** We don't actually have t-shirts.

UPDATE: Wave to the Mother Jones readers, too. Adam Weinsten linked over here in a post highlighting the most hilariously awesome command information video of all time -- so rife with jargon that I was actually laughing within the first 30 seconds. Seriously, go watch it. It'll make your day.

"We're just beginning to start to undo the damage"* caused by Michele Bachmann's goofy vocabulary

Everyone's favorite hot Congresswoman from a cold state gave the "Tea Party response" to the State of the Union last night, whatever that means. The speech was a doozy, and made one point more clearly than all others: if this woman wants to run for president, she really needs to hire a professional speechwriter. I'll leave it to others to criticize the substantive content of the speech, but let me just highlight one notable error related to our area of focus here at Ink Spots:

Just the creation of this nation itself was a miracle. Who can say that we won't see a miracle again? The perilous battle that was fought during World War II in the Pacific at Iwo Jima was a battle against all odds, and yet this picture immortalizes the victory of young GIs over the incursion against the Japanese. These six young men raising the flag came to symbolize all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor.

Yeah. I know. Don't even get me started on the language. ("Perilous battle"? "Victory... over the incursion against the Japanese"? Seriously?) But how about this whole "GIs" thing?

First, a question: how many people hear "GIs" and think "American military personnel" in a general sense? For me, "GI" is an Army-specific identifier. (Here's some interesting background on the origins of the term, which apparently started off as an initialization of "galvanized iron," the material Army trash cans were made out of.) We use "soldier," "sailor," "airman," and "Marine" to refer to members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps respectively, and "serviceman" to refer to them all. But obviously some folks think of "GI" as a catch-all. Do you?

The reason this is relevant to Bachmann's remarks: as all of you will surely already know, the Battle of Iwo Jima was contested by Marines and sailors, not by the Army. That's why the Marine Corps War Memorial is a giant forged bronze statue based on Joe Rosenthal's photograph "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima," which features five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman (for those who don't know: the USMC doesn't have medical personnel, so sailors serve with Marine units as corpsmen -- what the Army calls medics).

So yeah, whatever the "victory... over the incursion against the Japanese" was, it was achieved by Marines. It's possible Bachmann knew this and used "G.I." as a general term for all servicemen, but can we just get the lingo straight already?

Oh yeah, and while we're at it, here's another gem: "And I believe that America is the indispensable nation of the world."

1. Something necessary is indispensable to something else... not the indispensable element of a collective.

2. Do you think Bachmann realizes that her allusive catch-phrase was made famous -- indeed, branded on the public consciousness -- by a Democratic Secretary of State? Somehow I doubt it.

*The title of the post is an homage to Rep. Bachmann's very special style of speaking: earlier in her remarks, she said that Congress is "just beginning to start to undo the damage" caused by the administration's policies. Just beginning to start. We're fixin' to get going. Any minute now.

Look out, Afghanistan! Here come the Campaign Continuity Language Training Detachments!

In response to GEN McChrystal's November 2009 directive that each platoon-sized element in Afghanistan have "at least one leader that speaks Dari at least [sic] 0+ level, with a goal of level 1 in oral communications," the Defense Language Institute and the Army have collaborated to develop specialized language-training detachments to offer pre-deployment classes to troops at three major Army installations.

Soldiers at Fort Campbell, Ky., and Fort Carson, Colo., are now taking language courses that will better prepare them to meet the demands of operations in Afghanistan.

Since Feb.1, more than 70 Soldiers at Fort Campbell have studied either Dari or Pashto in advance of their upcoming deployments to Afghanistan. At Fort Carson, 270 Soldiers began learning Dari, March 8. It's expected some 70 Soldiers will begin Dari instruction in early April at Fort Drum, N.Y.

The three installations now host "Campaign Continuity Language Training Detachments." The detachments are the result of a partnership between the operational Army and the Defense Language Institute. The pilot program is a direct response to requirements put forth by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan, to put more "language-enabled" Soldiers on the ground there.

"His goal is to have one leader in every platoon or platoon-sized element that will
interact with the Afghan population who is familiar enough with the Dari language to go beyond the 'hellos' and 'thank yous' and platitudes -- but to instead have rudimentary conversations," said Lt. Col. Stephen J. Maranian, executive officer for the Army training directorate, G-3/5/7.

The three detachments were built with funding from the Joint Staff from the overseas contingency operations budget. Maranian said money is allocated already for fiscal years 2011-2015 to expand the program to more installations.

The first class at Fort Carson is only seven weeks as a result of time constraints, but future courses will last 16 weeks. Here's what the article has to say about the relationship between course duration and desired end states:

Most students in the past who have taken a 16-week language course ended up with a "0+/0+" level of language capability -- a rating that refers both to speaking and listening capability -- but many have achieved the higher 1/1 goal.

Clare Bugary, the director of operations at DLI, said the 16-week course will meet the 0+ requirement set by McChrystal, but for Soldiers to exceed that and achieve the goal of a level 1 skill, they will need to push themselves."The key is motivation," she said. "If they want it, they can get there. And what we are seeing at Carson and Campbell now is a motivated group of Soldiers who are applying themselves."

Bugary said to guarantee higher levels of language proficiency, students will need to spend more time in class. The DLI's normal Pashto-basic course is 64 weeks long, for instance. "There's no way the Army can send everybody through that.""It's an issue of time really," she said. But she added that the 16 weeks the Army is committing "says a lot" about their willingness to have Soldiers learn both the language and the culture of Afghanistan. "It's a big commitment for the Army to do that, and it's very
encouraging that the Army takes the steps to incorporate language and cultural training. It's going to have a positive effect."

Bugary said the language skill levels, "0+", or "1", for instance, are defined by the Interagency Language Roundtable. On the scale, a level 0 learner has "no ability whatsoever," while a level 0+ learner is "able to satisfy immediate needs with learned utterances." A level 1 student is "able to satisfy basic survival needs and minimum courtesy requirements."

(Here's some more information about skill level descriptions from the Interagency Language Roundtable's website. And here's some related video from DLI.)

It may be that I'm not reading closely enough, but I don't see any mention of how many classroom hours this training entails. Courses on-site at DLI are intensive and take up the bulk of the day, so I'd assume that's the model they're transporting to these other installations. But if this is a one-hour-a-day deal, then that's an entirely different story. You can't really expect people to learn a complicated and very foreign language without a serious commitment to the process, commitment that involves not only time but also centrality of focus. This really can't be something that you're doing alongside your other duties and training modules.

That being said...

Sam G. Garzaniti, director of the Campaign Continuity Language Program at Fort Campbell, said the classes focus first on basic listening and speaking skills before moving on to more practical applications for Soldiers in theater. Maranian added that counterinsurgency doctrine makes it absolutely essential to be able to communicate with village elders about such things as governance, economics and security."After a month, they know alphabet and basic phrases," he said. "In the coming weeks, they will learn social, economic, and military vocabulary to assist them when partnering with and operating amongst the Afghan people."

...are you effin' kidding me? A month to learn the alphabet and basic phrases? That's about how long it took the language retards in my Persian class to learn the alphabet and basic phrases... except we had class one night a week for two hours, and all other study was self-directed (and not really expected)!

I'm not an expert in philology or anything, or in memory, or in syllabus design or human cognition or pretty much anything relevant to this subject (or in pretty much anything at all, now that we're right down to it), but this strikes me as a shockingly un-ambitious learning plan. If you're doing five hours a day, then the first month involves 100 hours of exposure to the language. The entire sixteen week course of study makes 400 hours! As far as I know, Pashto and Dari are both State Department Category II languages, which are meant to require 1100 classroom hours for "minimal proficiency." I see that designation as being considerably more advanced than "basic survival needs and minimum courtesy requirements," mastery of which is what's necessary to demonstrate Level 1 speaking ability.

Does anybody else know anything about this program (particularly the length of the class day)? Has anyone learned a Cat II or Cat III language at DLI or the Foreign Service Institute? How long do you think it should take to be 0+ or 1 in Dari or Pashto? I'd love it if Lil would chime in here, as she's actually taught a language to USG personnel. Maybe I'm being a bit over-ambitious here.

Can we start using "literally"... literally?

The CBS Evening News is apparently doing a feature this week on "Where America Stands," in case you're interested in that sort of thing. I just read a transcript of last night's segment, introduced by Katie Couric and narrated by national security correspondent David Martin. In the opening for what seems otherwise to be a pretty solid feature -- Martin goes to Fort Monroe and talks to Mike Vane and H.R. McMaster, senior leaders at the U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) -- our intrepid correspondent said this:

If one moment could capture the unexpected trauma of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this would be it. American soldiers hit by a roadside bomb. [Apparently they were showing a clip of an IED attack.] Something as simple as a homemade booby trap literally blew up America’s plan for quick and easy victories.

Literally? Really? A homemade booby trap exploded and destroyed either the physical or conceptual war plan? Like, those dudes had a copy of "America's plan for quick and easy victories" in their vehicle and it was incinerated when the IED was detonated?

It literally makes my head explode when I see language used in this way. Wait, no it doesn't. "Makes my head explode" is just a colorful expression, a symbolic representation, a metaphor for my frustration.

(Before you say it, yes, I know that Joe Biden is literally the biggest abuser of this expression. As in, he is physically the largest person who says this. Literally.)