On Ridiculous Adjectives

Well, it's that time of the deployment—time to ensure all of the awards are written. There's a lot of unwritten rules which govern the writing of all Army awards (and evaluations, for that matter as well)—many of which were expressed with great insight in Robert Corham's excellent book about fighter pilot John Boyd, entitled Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.

Military writing seems to beg the use of superfluous adjectives, ill-concieved buzzwords and baffling grammatical constructions. I've never fully understood the military writing style, but I want to ensure that my Soldiers get awards and great evaluations, so I grumble, conform, and spell "82^nd" as "82d".

Needless to say, I often have difficulty adapting from professional writing Starbuck to military writing Starbuck. If you read a lot, you tend to model your writing after the people you read. This is why I think I have such difficulty writing in the "Army style"-- after all, no one willingly spends time or money on collections of Army field manuals or memorandums, do they? In fact, some of the best military writing ever looks distinctly unlike anything you'd find in Army Regulation 25-50.

Anyway, here are some bizarre examples of Army writing that I've collected over the years:

• Whenever you take part in an operation in which you shoot at the enemy, you need to add a superfluous adverb to make it sound awesome. For example, it's not enough to "engage the enemy"—you must "decisively engage the enemy". Decisively? As opposed to what, engaging the enemy indecisively?
  
• We also tend to use the phrase "conducting [blank] operations" for damned near everything. We "conduct aviation operations", "conduct parachuting operations", you get the picture. But sometimes it goes too far. A safety-gram that we received before Halloween 2004 warned us that "children in the Fort Bragg area will be conducting trick-or-treating operations". Yes, it's time to read something other than the daily operations order.
  
• Now, in a 21^st Century military, we thrive on updating our tactics and our doctrine. Nevertheless, we also sometimes take the lazy route and simply change around our terminology so as to incorporate the military's latest buzzwords without actually changing anything else. Note that after September 11^th, the Army seemed to change the names of all of its institutions to include the terms "warfighter" or "combat". For example, the US Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker changed its name to the US Army Aviation Warfighting Center, and the US Army Safety Center became the US Army Combat Readiness Center, despite the fact that they're still the same institutions (and often referred to by their old names). Do we really need to arbitrarily add "combat", "warrior" and "battle" to everything? Christ, it's getting to the point that you can't even shuffle paperwork without having to use a "battle stapler".
  
• There's also a lot of buzz words we throw about for absolutely no reason. "Full-spectrum" is one of those terms. Try it—count the number of times you see the word "full-spectrum" thrown arbitrarily about in mission statements. Are we really operating across the "full spectrum" of combat? Hopefully not, because that means nuclear war, and baby, I don't do nuclear war.
  
• There's also the Army's insistence on creating proper nouns out of thin air. The most blatant example of this occurred this year when, in an attempt to make the Army more appealing to families, the Army has decreed that the word "Family" is now a proper noun. I can imagine how the unveiling of this one played out. It must have been in a speech to Families, during which someone said, "Well, we're still trying to increase the amount of time Soldiers spend at home. Oh, but guess what—now, you're all proper nouns! Yeah, they capitalize 'Families' now. Okay, just the first letter."
  
• Let's also not forget the perpetual confusion over which war we are in. Even though the current administration prefers the term "Overseas Contingency Operation", many feel this term isn't quite sexy enough, and regresses to the old term "Global War on Terror", despite the strategic difficulties which many feel accompany that particular term (In the eyes of many, to include David Kilcullen, lumping a number of movements together and aggrandizing them gives these groups a sense of legitimacy).
  
• Finally, my all-time least favorite: abbreviating "82^nd" as "82d" in official correspondence. Seriously, we've gotten to the point where I can't buy an 82^nd (82d) Airborne Division bumper sticker because I'm afraid a 2^nd grader will correct me and say that I forgot the "n" in 82^nd. And he'd be right, too…
  

Christ, I hate writing awards.

Focus: Are there any more bizarre examples of Army writing that I'm missing? Feel free to chime in…