U.S. Defense Plan Has Been Dubbed Operation Noble Eagle

The military plan to protect the domestic shores of the United States is still nascent and sketchy, but it already has a patriotic name: Operation Noble Eagle.

Veterans say that in the modern military world, names such as this one, evoking a confident, predatory force overhead, are selected with great calculation.

Noble Eagle, announced by the Defense Department on Saturday, will be the umbrella name for, as one military spokesman put it, “the mission that covers homeland defense and consequence management” in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks.

Since Desert Shield and then Desert Storm became powerful public brand names for the U.S. mission in the Persian Gulf War, the long practice of naming military operations has become an exercise in creating touchstones as much as making convenient shorthand.

It was not always like that, according to retired Marine Maj. James P. Etter, chancellor of the American Military University in Manassas, Va. “Historically, I don’t think there was any real science to it. The names were a practical thing to identify operations in an easy way,” Etter said.

The naming of military operations is a century-old practice and many, such as Operation Overlord (the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II) or Operation Barbarossa (Germany’s code name for its Eastern Front campaign) became famous only with historical hindsight. The names evoke grand drama, but they weren’t on the lips of the fretting, home-front public of the day.

That changed, though, when the Desert Storm nickname became famous via the title logos used by news broadcasts and newspaper headlines. Merchants also co-opted the name for a flood of patriotic T-shirts, bumper stickers and even Christmas ornaments depicting streaking fighter planes.

Against that backdrop of public identification, military nicknames are more carefully weighed than ever, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Richard G. Trefry, a former director of the White House Military Office.

“The operation names are picked at the Joint Chiefs’ staff level and they have a whole lexicon to choose from, words that have a maritime feel if it’s an operation by sea or a bird name if by the air,” Trefry said, adding that names are reviewed to make sure they are not distasteful or politically insensitive.

Trefry recalled more capricious days when the operations were named on the fly--and the results were sometimes bruising. In the Korean War, for example, one attack plan was labeled Operation Slammer. “It didn’t work out too well, and we were the ones that got slammed.”

Through the years the thousands of colorful names for U.S. military operations large and small have included Operation Shiny Bayonet, Operation Longhorn, Operation Rainbow and Operation Jeb Stuart.