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.

The tip of a really idiotic iceberg

Over time, working in or around the defense bureaucracy inures you to stupidity, contradiction, and doublespeak. That's the only explanation I can give for not having already written about the proposed "empowerment" of the National Guard Bureau (by elevating its chief to membership in the Joint Chiefs of Staff), an idea so prosaically and unremarkably dumb that until last night -- when Twitter started throwing a collective wobbly about the whole thing -- it never even occurred to me to try to explain its fundamental bankruptcy. And maybe I'll get to that at some point, but for right now I want to talk about something that's way more important: the Defense Department can't even decide on the appropriate acronym for its own name.

It's possible that there are people in the world who identify me as marginally overconcerned with taxonomy and the doctrinal lexicon (which is a totally separate condition from typography nerd-ism, with which I am also afflicted). If you don't know what that means, I'll tell you in clearer terms: I like to whine about people using words and acronyms incorrectly. And I'm a particularly careful observer of the strange brand of pseudo-English spoken in the Pentagon. So when my friend Jon Rue asked this morning if I could clarify whether "DOD" or "DoD" is the appropriate form, I was happy to answer. The only problem is that there isn't a good answer, and that's where my desensitization apologia above comes in: somehow, this seems totally normal to me.

You might not have known this, but the U.S. military has its own dictionary. It's called Joint Publication (JP) 1-02, the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. The simplest way to explain it is this: JP 1-02 takes all the terms and acronyms included in the various joint doctrinal publications and puts them in one place. If you're conversant in such things, you'll know from the title that the dictionary itself is a joint doctrinal manual; that means it's authoritative.

The preface of the manual lays out its scope and purpose: it "sets forth standard US military and associated terminology to encompass the joint activity of the Armed Forces of the United States," and the terms included "constitute approved Department of Defense (DOD) terminology for general use by all DOD components." To be even more clear:

This publication applies to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Services, the Joint Staff, combatant commands, DOD agencies, and all other DOD components. It is the primary terminology source when preparing correspondence, to include policy, strategy, doctrine, and planning documents. [Emphasis mine.]

That seems to just about settle it, right? JP 1-02 applies to everyone, and it's your primary source document for pretty much all writing, right? If you need to know the Department's position on the meaning of a specific term or acronym, you go to the dictionary: JP 1-02.

So what does 1-02 have to say about abbreviating the Department's name? Check out page A-45: it's DOD. This makes a lot of sense, seeing as the Pentagon refers to other Departments using the same format: DOS, DOJ, etc. (Curiously, the Department of the Navy is referred to as DON, while the Department of the Army is just DA. Don't ask me. Perhaps avoidance of "DOA" is self-explanatory.) So there you have it: DOD, simple as.

Oh, but not so fast, my friends. Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI/DODI) 5025.12, which is LULZily titled "Standardization of Military and Associated Terminology," uses "DoD" throughout. So does every other Department of Defense issuance (ppt) -- all other DoDIs and DoD Directives (DoDDs), plus Pubs, Manuals, Administrative Instructions, and Memorandums (sic; yep, that's correct DoD usage, too). You know what else uses "DoD"? DoD 5110.04-M, the "DoD Manual for Written Material."

THE DOD MANUAL FOR WRITTEN MATERIAL AND THE DOD INSTRUCTION ON STANDARDIZATION OF MILITARY AND ASSOCIATED TERMINOLOGY BOTH USE A DIFFERENT FORM THAN THE DOD DICTIONARY OF MILITARY AND ASSOCIATED TERMS. YA RLY.

Want to hear something even more awesome? The "Writing Style Guide and Preferred Usage for DoD Issuances" document (pdf), hosted on "The Official Department of Defense Web Site [sic] for DoD Issuances" and based on a memo from Bob Gates's executive secretary that Spencer Ackerman wrote about earlier this year (in a post called "Pentagon Issues Bitchy Acronym Memo (PIBAM)"), and which is a good quick-reference if you slept through 8th grade language arts, completely elides the whole dispute, noting only that "the acronyms 'DoD,' 'OSD,' and 'U.S.' do not need to be established upon first use." (The document also features a lowercase-o "DoD" in the ALL CAPS TITLE on the first page, not to mention specifying use of "website" in spite of the inclusion of "Web Site" in the header of the website/web site/Web Site on which it is hosted.)

But here's the absolute best part:

3. RESOURCES FOR WRITING DoD ISSUANCES. Use the resources in priority order below when you have questions on English usage, writing style, format, content, and organization of DoD issuances.

a. The Issuance Process

(1) Format, content, and organization Standards for each type of issuance.

(2) Frequently Asked Questions. [on the host website]

(3) Common Mistakes. [on the host website]

(4) DoD 5110.4-M, “DoD Manual for Written Material.”

(5) JP 1-02.

That's right, the authoritative "primary terminology source" that is codified in joint doctrine, the Department's dictionary -- JP 1-02 -- is only to be consulted if a conclusive answer cannot be found in a different DoD/DOD issuance... which in this case happens to offer a contradictory answer.

As if all of that wasn't bad enough, an older version of the usage guide included this provision:

The following acronyms and abbreviations may be used as adjectives only: U.S., DoD, POTUS, SecDef, DepSecDef, CJCS, VCJCS, DJS, VDJS, JCS, JS. Spell the terms out when using them as nouns.

So "DoD issuances" but "documents issued by the Department of Defense." (Or something.) The current version has eliminated that bit; now it only applies to "United States/U.S."

If you're still reading, quit. You've already thought about this for ten minutes longer than anyone else in the Pentagon. Which, in case you're wondering, seems like a safe substitute ("Pentagon," that is) for any of the various titles, acronyms, initialisms, or other forms of address used to collectively refer to the organizations and personnel who work in, around, beneath, or in connection with that building, and which/who seem incapable of conclusively deciding on what to call themselves.

Wait, I've got one last acronym for you: FML.

...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.

Learn to Speak Pentagon, Lesson 2: "FYI/FYSA"

I could almost literally not be more surprised with the enthusiastic reaction to Lesson 1 of this series, both on Twitter and by email. People always like a peek behind the scenes, I guess, and language tells us a little something about the way organizations work (or, alternatively, don't). Nathan Hodge tweeted a great suggestion for our next edition (complete with illustrative transcript!), but I just wanted to dash off a quick one on my way out this afternoon and his takes a little more focused elaboration. So I instead took my inspiration from good buddy Ex, who just this afternoon tweeted:

@abumuqawama: Speaking Pentagon: @InkSptsGulliver works the issue for your personal S.A.

Yet another one that would scarcely have occurred to me had it not been pointed out, and as such perfect fodder for Lesson 2: "FYI/FYSA."

FYI/FYSA [eff why eye, eff why ess eh], abbr. For your information, for your situational awareness. "FYSA: I have your tasker and am working it"; "FYI/SA: Gulliver has another Learn to Speak Pentagon post up on the blog."

These two abbreviations are used interchangeably, most often as the introduction to email (particularly forwarded communications from a third party). Those who thoughtlessly swap the two make a grave mistake, however, because there is a fundamental difference in meaning. While each indicates "you should know about this, though I don't expect you to take action as a result," the latter expression carries an additional connotation: "I am a douchebag who has worked in the Pentagon too long to write like a normal human."

Ok, I'm being a bit judgey, aren't I? I'll cop to dropping this one into emails from time to time, and I think there is actually a distinct meaning: SA is somewhere in the uncertain quantum space between "for your information" and "for your action." As in this might pertain to you and it might not, but if I use "FYI" you might wrongfully conclude that you don't need to do anything. You know, keeping you in the loop. You can't say "FYI" to your boss, after all -- who the hell are you to tell him what he needs to know?! But if you just want the guy to be situationally aware... then it's like you're trying to keep him from getting surprised. That's good staff work!*

FYSA: In the next lesson, we'll learn the phrase "long pole in the tent." In the meantime, you can work these two until I pin the rose on you for Lesson 3.

*FYI: Everything in the paragraph preceding this notation is exculpatory narrative/possible bullshit intended to soothe my embarrassment at having been called out for using "FYSA" in an email to my girlfriend a few weeks ago.

Learn to Speak Pentagon, Lesson 1: "We're working that"

From time to time, a blogger or member of the Pentagon press corps will bring public attention to a curious word or turn of phrase frequently employed by military officers and natsec bureaucrats; I'm frankly stunned no one has turned this into a regular feature. The only explanation I can think of is that those of who are habitually exposed to Pentagonese have ceased to find this abuse of the English language either noteworthy or remarkable. I experienced this very phenomenon myself last week when I saw this tweet from Nathan Hodge of the Wall Street Journal:

@nohodge: Pentagonspeak word of the day: "Non-concur." #pentagonese

Wait, what the heck is wrong with that? I thought. And sure, it's a real word, but how often do you hear that one out in the world? In the Pentagon, though, it's totally standard: when you're providing an organizational position on some kind of a staffing action, your options are to concur, concur with comment, or non-concur. Concurrence is basically "agree as written," as you'd imagine, and a non-concurrence suggests that whatever fix you require would substantively change the product. So there you go: non-concur.

Sharon Weinberger teased us with this Danger Room post a couple of years ago; instead of kicking off an entertaining series, her "How to: Speak Pentagon" would stand alone as a one-off. She really nailed it when pointing out "the overuse of metaphors such as 'a bridge too far' or 'the long pole in the tent,'" though I'd broaden it and say "the rampant overuse of idiomatic expressions." This one is insane, and incredibly distracting: it's impossible to have a conversation in the building without hearing about who's going to "get the rose pinned on them," or how we need to focus on the "ten-meter targets," or even -- to cite one that's entered the popular lexicon -- put more "boots on the ground." 

Since none of these press-passers will deliver the goods, I'm going to take up the reins. (See what I did there?) So I'm going to continue Learn to Speak Pentagon as an irregular series, with posts coming as frequently as I can re-civilianize my brain enough to notice the weird expressions. I'm also happy to take suggestions by tweet, comment, or email, though I can always count on a quick swim through the recent DoD transcripts for some fodder. But I don't want to use up all the good stuff in the introductory edition, right? Let's get right to Lesson 1: "We're working that."

working that [wur-king ðæt], v. To have a task under control but not yet completed or prepared for socialization. "Yeah, don't worry, I've got your tasker. We're working it."

This one doesn't jump out at you as being all that different, I know. After all, civilians can work things too, right? But let's be clear: you're never working on something. You're just working it. You know, running down the traps. Making phone calls. Putting slides together. Working it. You work it until you're done drafting a response, and then you have a product. Then you socialize the product. (At which time other people will be working it.) Then you get your comment matrix back, you make your changes, you re-staff, you get your concurs and your non-concurs, you get your leadership chop, and so on. What are you doing? You're working it. The person or organization awaiting your response shouldn't expect to hear any kind of update during this period of time, but they're not worried: after all, you told 'em "we're working that."

Other uses: working a tasker; working that suspense; working your request