Naming military operations

Independent:

In 1943, always circumspect about his place in the history books, Winston Churchill sent a memo to his top military commanders. He was addressing the issue of how the British Army should name its military operations. At the time, names were selected at random. But the nomenclature of war, he insisted, should strike a tone between the boastful and banal. At all costs, he wrote, they should not "enable some widow or mother to say their son was killed in an operation called Bunnyhug".

These days the question of what to call your invasion, liberation or peace-keeping force is trickier than christening a baby; a suitable name for an angelic newborn might not be appropriate when it becomes a troublesome teenager. Keen to keep the public onside, the US administration has announced that, in acknowledgement of the gradual withdrawal of its troops, Operation Iraqi Freedom – the umbrella term for all US operations in Iraq – will now be rebranded Operation New Dawn. "It sends a strong signal that Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended, and that our forces are operating under a new mission," wrote US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, in a memo leaked to ABC News.

...

In the Second World War, the US military decided to use a system borrowed from the British in which they randomly selected names from a list of 10,000 common nouns and adjectives (Cornflakes, Magic). But in exceptional cases, Churchill stepped in to name operations himself. Operation Overlord, the label given to the 1944 invasion of western Europe that began with the Normandy landings, went on to become one of the war's most memorable monikers.

...

The battlefield of history is littered with notable naming mistakes. In 1940, the British deduced the intent of the Germans' Operation Sea Lion (a marine invasion of Britain) from its name....

There is more including some names that were not real winners that seem to match the results of the operation. The Germans named their invasion of Russia Operation Barbarossa, after a king in the Middle Ages.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more