The Military Name Game
By SARAH BOXER Published: October 13, 2001
For a few days in September it looked as if the United States would be fighting a war named Infinite Justice. By late September the name was gone. The Council on American-Islamic Relations had found the name offensive because it sounded too much like Eternal Retribution. In other words the United States seemed to be assuming God's role. On Sept. 25 Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that the military operation would be called Enduring Freedom.
Never mind that Enduring Freedom presented its own troubling ambiguities: Is ''enduring'' supposed to be taken as an adjective, like long-lasting? Or as a present participle, as in ''How long are we going to be enduring this freedom?''
This is not the first time that the name of a military operation has been floated then grounded. The history of naming such operations shows how an art that was once covert has slowly become bureaucratic propaganda.
As Lt. Col. Gregory C. Sieminski points out in his classic short history, ''The Art of Naming Operations,'' published in 1995 in Parameters, the quarterly of the United States Army War College, the name of the 1989 United States invasion of Panama, Just Cause, was originally Blue Spoon, until the commander of the Special Operations Command, Gen. James Lindsay, asked an operations officer on the Joint Staff, Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, ''Do you want your grandchildren to say you were in Blue Spoon?”
So who does create nicknames for military operations these days? There are 24 Defense Department entities, each of which is assigned ''a series of two-letter alphabetic sequences,'' Colonel Sieminski explains. For example, AG-AL, ES-EZ, JG-JL, QA-QF, SM-SR and UM-UR belong to the Atlantic Command. In order to name the invasion of Granada in 1983, the Atlantic Command started with the letters UR and came up with Urgent Fury. Once the name was generated, it was sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who sent it to the Defense Secretary for the ultimate decision.
But all this can be overridden if the naming seems important enough. And that seems to be happening more and more. ''Since 1989 U.S. military operations have been nicknamed with an eye toward shaping domestic and international perceptions,'' Colonel Sieminski notes.
A huge effort, for example, went into choosing the right name for the operation to defend Kuwait from Iraq. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf wanted the name Peninsula Shield, even though the letters PE were not assigned to his command. Then Crescent Shield was proposed, with an eye to local sentiment. Finally it became Desert Shield. And then the word ''desert'' bloomed and multiplied: Desert Storm, Desert Saber, Desert Farewell, Desert Share.
The naming game began with the Germans. In World War II they seem to have been the first to give military operations code names, Colonel Sieminski writes. They ransacked mythology and religion for ideas: Archangel, St. Michael, St. George, Roland, Mars, Achilles, Castor, Pollux, and Valkyrie. Hitler himself named the invasion of the Soviet Union Barbarossa for the ''12th-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, who had extended German authority over the Slavs in the east,'' Colonel Sieminski writes.
Churchill, like Hitler, was partial to names that came from ''heroes of antiquity, figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the constellations and stars, famous racehorses, names of British and American war heroes,'' Colonel Sieminski writes. And he set naming etiquette. Names should not ''imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment,'' Churchill said; they should not have ''an air of despondency''; they should not be frivolous or ordinary; and they should not be a target for fun. No widow or mother, Churchill said, should have ''to say that her son was killed in an operation called 'Bunnyhug' or 'Ballyhoo.' ''
For all of Churchill's pains with nomenclature, the names of British and American operations were originally designed to be secret, not meant for public ears until the war or operation was finished.
The United States named its first operations after colors. When the colors began to run out, the War Department drew up a list of ''10,000 common nouns and adjectives,'' avoiding ''proper nouns, geographical terms, and names of ships'' that might give military clues away to the enemy, Colonel Sieminski writes. And each theater had its own blocks of code words; ''the European Theater got such names as Market and Garden, while the Pacific Theater got names like Olympic and Flintlock.''
Soon after World War II ended, the Pentagon began creating operation names that were especially designed for public ears. The first nickname was Operation Crossroads, for the 1946 atomic bomb tests conducted on Bikini Atoll. And then things opened up more. During the Korean War Gen. Douglas MacArthur ''permitted code names to be declassified and disseminated to the press once operations had begun, rather than waiting until the end of the war,'' Colonel Sieminski writes.
What followed were some very ''aggressive nicknames'' for counteroffensives in China: Thunderbolt, Roundup, Killer, Ripper, Courageous, Audacious, and Dauntless.
The bloody names kept flowing in Vietnam, but public relations concerns soon stemmed the tide. The most controversial name, Colonel Sieminski notes, was Masher, the nickname for a ''sweep operation through the Bong Son Plain.'' President Lyndon B. Johnson ''angrily protested that it did not reflect 'pacification emphasis,' '' In other words Masher somehow did not say ''peace'' to the world, Colonel Sieminski writes. Masher was reborn as White Wing. After 1966, operations tended to be named for towns and figures: Junction City, Bastogne, Nathan Hale. To rouse the troops at the Khe Sanh garrison, a ''round-the-clock bombing attack'' was called Operation Niagara, ''to invoke an image of cascading shells and bombs,'' Colonel Sieminski notes.
By the end of the Vietnam War the process of naming had grown baroque. So in 1975 the Joint Chiefs of Staff created a computer system, the Code Word, Nickname, and Exercise Term System. ''The Nicka system is not, as some assume, a random word generator for nicknames,'' Colonel Sieminski writes; ''it is in fact merely an automated means for submitting, validating and storing them.''
There is plenty of room for drama. But the fashion now, he writes, is ''to make the names sound like mission statements by using a verb-noun sequence: Promote Liberty, Restore Hope, Uphold Democracy, Provide Promise.'' They are boring, unmemorable names.
Despite the monotonous trend, names are more important than they have ever been. With ''the shrinking scale of military action,'' Colonel Sieminski writes, the nickname of an operation now may well become the name for the whole war and its rationale. Maybe that is the problem.
Robin Tolmach Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of ''The Language War,'' a book about the unintentional overtones of language, said, ''Whoever gives the name has control over it.'' Naming an operation is like naming a baby, she added. ''Your creation is opaque, but the name suggests what you hope it will be.'' What then was the hope with Infinite Justice and then with Enduring Freedom?
The nouns in the name of the operation, she said, were no problem: freedom and justice. It was the adjectives that presented problems. The name had to please so many different kinds of people that every adjective seemed fraught with offensive overtones. ''It is a virtue in times of peril,'' Ms. Lakoff said, ''to find words without meaning.''