Vocab for War

I have often marveled at America for being the only country which goes to war and expects zero casualties! Of course, that’s mostly because the US fights its wars way outside its borders which inevitably raises the question domestically: why should our guys die for some reason associated with another corner of the world?

Starting with the advent of missiles and now with drones, it’s entirely possible for the US to fight most wars without putting any “boots on the ground”.

Jonathan Bernstein argues that this new type of warfare, with no soldiers on the ground, deserves a new term. Why? To make it clear to the American public that succeed or fail, they won’t see any body bags being flown in:
“The press, along with the political establishment, utterly failed to find, or at least to consistently use, a vocabulary for what was on the table. Certainly air or missile strikes are an act of war, and should be reported as such; just as certainly, those sorts of limited attacks always bring with them the risk of additional involvement – either from retaliation or from mission creep. At the same time, calling that “going to war” summons up images of, well, troops marching, and casualties coming home to hospitals or in body bags. Even keeping the risks in mind, that’s not what was being talked about. A vocabulary is really needed to make clear that it is “real” war, but that it’s also not at all similar to Iraq, the Gulf War, or other full-out invasions.”

Daniel Larison disagrees:
“I don’t see why a new vocabulary is required. If firing missiles at the armed forces of another government is an act of war, and it certainly is, the vocabulary to describe this already exists. If many people have a certain idea of what it means to “go to war” that refers to a bigger commitment than “limited” strikes, that doesn’t change what the government is proposing to do.”

Before you dismiss the call for new war vocabulary as just an instance of The Animal Farm or 1984’ish approach to play with words to distort the truth, consider what Nassim Taleb wrote in The Bed of Procrustes:
“We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.”

Is it time to think if the word “war” is now a “prepackaged narrative”, to use the Taleb phrase? Has technology changed war to a point where we need a new narrative, a new word? Is Bernstein right after all?

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