Overseas Contingency Operations Against Something or Other

US News | Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 1:47:06 pm PDT

I’m really not sorry to see the phrase “War on Terror” being retired by the Pentagon; it’s always seemed like a complete misnomer. You don’t fight a war against a tactic, you fight against people with an ideology. This battle would have been much better described as the “War on Militant Islam,” but our government is too hobbled by political correctness to ever be that direct and truthful.

But the problem now is that they’re retiring one misnomer and replacing it with another that’s even more vague and meaningless.

In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department’s office of security review noted that “this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT.] Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’”