Verbal Warfare : Defense Department Doublespeak Proves That Power Creates Its Own Language

IN WRITING RECENTLY of oxymorons--self-contradictory phrases such as thunderous silence-- I agreed with a reader that military intelligence was a good example.

“Given the military’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot (e.g., the Vincennes incident),” I said that the words military intelligence seem a contradiction.

Marine Col. Jack W. Rippy of El Toro disputes that conclusion with typical Marine Corps spirit, arguing that “in the press of the moment,” the Vincennes commander “used correct judgment” and has been exonerated.

He challenges my allegation that the Defense Department indulges in doublespeak, as in the term friendly casualties for men killed by our own fire.

Rippy defends friendly casualties as a “poignantly precise term” for a disaster that is “saddening to contemplate and loathsome to experience, but hardly doublespeak.”

He adds: “Certainly, its use does not comprise an example that would justify your assertion that the Department of Defense favors euphemistic obfuscations.”

I assert, indeed, that the very term Department of Defense is a euphemistic obfuscation for War Department, which it used to be.

I also note that the National Council of Teachers of English recently gave first prize in its annual Doublespeak Awards to Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and two admirals for their report on the Vincennes incident.

I do not quarrel with Rippy’s assertion that career military personnel are highly qualified (at least up to the rank of colonel) and that they exemplify “military intelligence.”

But the whole history of warfare abounds in blunders. There is something about the nature of war that leads its most exalted practitioners into the most abysmal errors.

Even with Napoleon’s wretched retreat from Moscow serving as a warning, Adolf Hitler committed the fatal error of invading Russia and thereby lost World War II.

In World War I, at the Somme, the Allied high command sent British troops marching across no man’s land into German machine guns with a loss of 21,000 lives in the first few minutes. Before the campaign was over, British casualties numbered 419,654, French 200,000. Surely there was some stupidity in high places there.

The loss of 241 Marines to a truck bomb in Lebanon was a classic study in stupidity. Though that tragedy was ultimately the President’s responsibility, one wonders why the men were cooped up in such a vulnerable target.

Pearl Harbor was the ultimate military blunder; both sides erred on a grand scale. The American defenses on Oahu were prepared for sabotage, not air attack, its commanders ignoring the military axiom that one must defend against what the enemy can do, not what he might do.

And the Japanese blunder was even more costly. Had the Japanese made another attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying its fuel tanks and shipyard repair facilities, they could have extended the war for years and might have won a negotiated settlement. As Georges Clemenceau said: “War is too important to be left to the generals.”

As for the Defense Department, its blunders could fill a book: “The Pathology of Power,” by Norman Cousins, documents the Pentagon’s shameful record of waste and faulty judgment. Take AWACS, the Air Force spy plane that cost $9 billion for 35 models. It was supposed to win World War III, but it was so over-engineered that its high-tech armament was battle-ready only about 15% of the time.

Cousins adds that the M-16 rifle, used by Americans in Vietnam, was so badly designed that when the Viet Cong won a fire fight, they would pick the American dead clean of everything except their rifles, which they scorned.

The Defense Department excels in doublespeak. For example, the words erode the will of the population translate as “bomb civilians.”

Escalating the war effort means killing more people; locating areas for concentration of resources refers to flying bombing missions; a reduced blast-enhanced radiation device is the neutron bomb.

Cousins said: “Power tends to drive intelligence underground” and “power tends to create a language of its own, making other forms of communication incoherent and irrelevant.”

And that’s not doublespeak.