Who comes up with the names for US military operations, like the “Phantom Fury” or “Noble Eagle”? Is it someone’s job in the Pentagon to sit around and think about cool names for future missions? My personal hunch is that the Pentagon has a special set of dice with intimidating-sounding words. Then they just roll them and combine the two words that come up. Your thoughts?
ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: There is a fair amount of information about this in “the literature” (which, these days here at the library, means online databases). I will summarize it here, but to find several entertaining full-length articles you can go to, say, ProQuest, then go to Advanced Search and search the words “military operations names” in the “Article title” field. You should loosen up or play around with this search to find more articles. Yes, things have come a long way from Operation Overlord to Operation Enduring Freedom, and the names are generally as amusing to AP’s cynical mind as they are to the headline writers of these newspaper articles (“Operation Slick Moniker”) … except that the folks coming up with these terms are serious!
Apparently operation names were first used by the Germans in WWI. In WWII, the Germans focused on terms from mythology and religion (e.g., “Valkyrie”). Hitler himself apparently named the invasion of the Soviet Union “Barbarossa,” relating to Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, who had vanquished Slavs. Joint U.S.-British operations came from the Combined British-United States Interservice Code Word Index, but still, folks like Churchill and Eisenhower seemed to have been personally involved in the naming of major operations.
Today, the naming procedure sounds like something devised by Buck Henry.
The names are generated by computers in the military’s NICKA unit (for the Nickname and Exercise Term System). AP is not making this up (not that I ever do). Each of a couple of dozen Defense Department entities is assigned a series of two-letter alphabetic sequences, such as AG-AL, ES-EZ, etc. (Operation names now always seem to consist of two words, so these would be the first two letters of the adjective.) Possibilities are passed up through the command until the Secretary of Defense gets the final decision (at least for the big operations). They look for names that avoid “lightness or vulgarity,” and most people agree that these names sound as though they were written by committee rather than chosen by a decisive Churchill- (or Hitler-) like figure.
Your dice theory may work as well.
For an official history from the Army, see “The Art of Naming Operations” by Gregory C. Sieminski, complete with 107 endnotes, published in the Autumn 1995 issue of Parameters (v.25, no.3), from the United States Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. You can find this in Perkins Library’s Public Documents collection in the basement at call number D 101.72:v.25.