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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clarksterh who wrote (87167)	3/28/2003 12:03:36 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

F R O M T H E F R O N T L I N E S Lyndsey Layton, a metro reporter for The Post, is embedded with Naval forces in the Persian Gulf. A Harrowing Homecoming in a Sandy Fog on the Sea By Lyndsey Layton Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, March 27, 2003; Page A24 ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN, March 26 -- The view from the cockpit was a wash of gauzy beige. No ocean, no ships, no horizon -- nothing to orient Lt. John Turner as he strained to guide his supersonic jet through an oceangoing sandstorm to land on a floating patch of steel. Like a photographic image developing in a chemical bath, the faint outline of the aircraft carrier's tower suddenly materialized on the right through the sandy fog. In seconds, video from his cockpit camera showed later, he was descending on the flight deck, pointing the sharp nose of his F/A-18E Super Hornet down, catching the arresting wire that would bring his plane to a stop. Under the best circumstances, landing a jet on an aircraft carrier is perilous. Because the carrier's deck isn't long enough for a normal landing, a jet makes what is essentially a controlled crash. It roars in at 140 mph and, if the pilot has done everything right, a hook protruding from the jet's belly catches on a steel wire strung taut across the deck, jerking the plane to a halt in two seconds. But today, the flight deck was obscured by a sandstorm that swirled from sea level in the Persian Gulf to 8,000 feet in the sky. The landings were so hair-raising that normally steely pilots went limp and the ship's captain talked of miracles. "We wouldn't even dream to fly today if not for the war," said Capt. Larry Burt, who is responsible for coordinating the Iraq air campaign among three U.S. battle groups in the Gulf. REST AT:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34620-2003Mar26?language=printer

To: Clarksterh who wrote (87167)	3/28/2003 12:36:19 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Jargon of war quickly crosses ideological gulf to daily usage By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff, 3/27/2003 ''Vertical envelopment'' could be a hot new techno band or a Back Bay zoning scheme. In fact, it's a term used by Pentagon officials -- masters of warspeak -- to describe the unleashing of massive air power on Baghdad, selectively targeting key installations, in the first phase of the war against Iraq. Think ''carpet bombing'' without the deep-pile connotation. Should the ''shock and awe'' campaign pave the way to ''catastrophic success,'' to borrow two more examples of current war lingo, then something besides an oxymoron worthy of Joseph Heller's ''Catch-22'' could be realized. ''Catastrophic'' in this context means supremely good, and leads to ''decapitation'' (the removal of Saddam Hussein) followed by -- all together now, class -- ''regime change.'' Or ''debaathification,'' as an Iraqi dissident called it this week. Got that? If not, awe shucks. Your vocabulary is, like, so Desert Storm. ''Every war is like a family tussle, with a general construct and its own characteristics,'' says Anne Soukhanov, US general editor of Microsoft's Encarta College Dictionary and a dedicated tracker of word usage. ''As those characteristics change -- weapons, location, the generation that's fighting the war -- so does the language.'' From the first Gulf War, says Soukhanov, we got Humvees and MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) and ''the mother of all battles,'' which proved to be the mother of all-purpose phrases. ''There's an example of how one side, in this case Saddam Hussein, uses an expression that captures the imagination of the other side and becomes a font,'' Soukhanov says. ''Now we hear things like `the mother of all traffic jams.' '' Examples of freshly minted warspeak abound in newspaper columns, Web dispatches, and TV broadcasts. Terms such as ''embeds'' (reporters traveling with the troops), ''unilaterals'' (nonattached reporters), ''casevac'' (short for casualty evacuation), ''NBC assault'' (referring to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, not the peacock network), and ''target of opportunity'' have swiftly embedded themselves in the national lexicon, so to speak. (Dave Anderson wondered in a recent New York Times column which football coach might first use ''target of opportunity'' to describe ''how his team took advantage of a glaring weakness in an opponent's defense.'') Just since Saturday, the phrase ''shock and awe'' has appeared more than 700 times in US newspapers and magazines. ''Collateral damage,'' a slightly older species of war jargon referring to civilian casualties, has taken on new currency as coalition forces pound Baghdad and other cities. ''Shaping fires'' -- an effort to weaken enemy forces so they can be wiped out by subsequent attacks -- appears to be gaining ground with military officials. Sexy new acronyms and initials have become ubiquitous as well, from MOABs (''massive ordnance air burst,'' also ''mother of all bombs'') to UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) to SSE (sensitive site exploitation) forces. There is even a military alphabet -- S Day, D Day, A Day, G Day -- signifying moments in the battle, some occurring on the same day, when specific goals are realized by specific US commanders. REST AT:http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/086/living/Jargon_of_war_quickly_crosses_ideological_gulf_to_daily_usuageP.shtml