Acronym Wars

What we call wars matters, especially when we don't yet know what they mean

Names matter. True for people and true for wars. In December 1989, just a day (hours really) before America commenced operations against Panama, General James Lindsay, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, called Lieutenant General Thomas Kelly, Director of Operations on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, with an usual request: could they change the name of the operation? The operation had been known up to that moment as “Blue Spoon”, a name which Lindsay felt would land poorly with future generations. As he put it to General Kelly, “Do you want your grandchildren to say you were in Blue Spoon?” The answer was no and Operation Just Cause was born. The rest is history.

What does this mean, then, for wars which are known only as acronyms? On a recent visit to my local VA clinic, I noticed a sign saying “OIF/OEF/OND”. These letters stand for Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq 2003-2010), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan 2001-2014), and Operation New Dawn (Iraq 2010-2011), the official names of the conflicts in which millions of Americans served.¹² Seeing them posted in the VA, I thought to myself, “is this how these wars will be remembered”?

Or put differently, will my grandchildren say that I served in OEF? Or will they say the Afghanistan War? The War on Terror?

Soldiers lower the final American flag at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. Source: DVIDS.

Subconsciously, this question of memory has been building for awhile. Earlier in June, I started research for the 75th anniversary of the Korean War. On June 25, 1950 North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Though the conflict turned into a brutal war that cost close to 37,000 Americans and over 400,000 South Koreans their lives, it was called the “forgotten war” as early as October 1951.³ The war—technically a “police action”—featured prominently in the 1952 president election, but never secured any lasting place in the American psyche. This lack of collective reflection undermined the transition experiences of those who had served and arguably negatively impacted American national security decision-making for many decades, especially with respect to East Asia.⁴

I can see a Korean War veteran in the late 1950s walking into the VA. He notices a sign on the wall, maybe it reads “KMAG” for Korean Military Advisory Group, or “UNC” for United Nations Command. Outside on the street, those letters mean almost nothing, but within this former soldier’s mind, they mean almost everything. Though their functional purpose is to provide directions for treatment, these acronyms are portals for the initiated, entry points for a journey to places with names such as Taejon-ni, Hill 255, Sobangsan, Kasan, and others.

The power of such remembrances for veterans has long been noted. World War II veteran Paul Fussell, in his epic study of World War I literature The Great War and Modern Memory, wrote that for soldiers, “[r]evisiting the battlefields in memory becomes as powerful a ritual obligation as visiting the cemeteries.” For veterans and families of the post-9/11 wars, the letters OIF, OEF, OND—and we could add OFS and OIR among others—are integral parts of these rituals. But that is not the case for most Americans.

To the extent the broader American population tries to reflect on these wars, they face a pneumonic battlefield littered with terms and letters. Thrown in the mix alongside at least five different operational names (e.g., OIF, OEF, etc.) are terms like the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the War on Terror, GWOT, and so on. Each name captures part of the story, but only a part.

If we had a robust shared understanding of the main story, if there was one, true, common narrative that the vast majority of Americans understood about these wars, we could probably be all right with this jumble of names. Wars are never neat and tidy, and always subject to debate, but there can be some matter of truth that penetrates with sufficient breadth and depth to allow disagreements to play out across a common foundation. This can make all the difference when it comes to revisiting, reflecting on, and ultimately learning from war, even if we refer to those wars with different terms. After all, what does it matter that we enter through different doors if we all end up in the same room? But I question whether we have a common foundation with the post-9/11 wars.

But I also don’t believe the matter is closed. We are still in these wars. This is literally true, with soldiers still serving in places such as Iraq, but narratively true as well. The meaning of these wars is still something not just up for debate, but arguably still yet to be known. Much like Churchill ended up seeing World War I and World War II as one long war, Americans may yet see the first several decades of the 21st century as one long conflict, the end of which still remains in the future.⁵

Thus the imperative is to get engaged, to shape both how we remember the post-9/11 wars and the lessons we take from them. We can all still influence not just the names our grandchildren and their children use to describe our wars, but the meaning, the broader national narrative, the names evoke.

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Additional Resources:

1. Paul Fussell passed away in 2012. PBS has some background info on his military service here.

1. Different data sources look at “post-9/11” veterans or at the “Iraq War” or “Afghanistan War”.

2. Operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan continued beyond OND and OEF; Americans deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, which is still active, and to Afghanistan as part of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, which ended in the chaotic and painful evacuation in 2021. I assume that the sign at my VA clinic went up either before those operations commenced or that they chose to only include the three operations as they captured the largest number of veterans.

3. In addition to US and South Korean casualties, there were over 100,000 casualties from the United Nations force. Army 250 will take a more focused look at the Korean War (1950-1953) in the coming weeks.

4. A lot to debate on this point, but I’d argue America would have benefitted from a more robust interrogation of its Korean War experiences; in particular, strengths and weaknesses of the domino theory that played a large part in the conflict.

5. Paul Fussell makes this observation about Churchill in The Great War and Modern Memory, pg 344.