As anyone who has ever worked in The Building will tell you, the national security bureaucracy has its own special brand of communication. I’m not just talking about the acronyms, mystifying as they can be, or the doctrinal jargon. Trades and professions often have specialized vocabulary; this is especially true of technical fields and complex organizations. What’s curious about the Defense Department is the way that language is used, not so much the words themselves: popular idiomatic expressions are chopped and changed liberally, peppered throughout briefings and casual conversations alike as universally-understood signifiers of meaning. This can strike a speaker of standard English as more than a little odd, particularly in a world where concrete explanation of complicated concepts seems – no exaggeration – vital to national security. If you’re being uncharitable, you could almost say these low-content, pre-fab clichés are used as a substitute for real thinking.
Now that you understand the disease, let’s take a look at a few of the symptoms. Here’s a brief list of terms to serve as an illustrative primer on the lexicon of the Pentagon.
Put steel on target – To take decisive action on a particular task, to get to work, to show results. Synonymous with “put rounds downrange.” More often used in the Building to reference administrative tasks than artillery shells.
“The boss is wondering what the hell is going on with this project. We really need to put steel on target with that briefing tomorrow.”
Piece – Catch-all term used to refer to any grouping of tasks, objects, ideas, or actions that can be coherently described by a single modifier; often a sub-set of a broader grouping, as with a specific working group within an integrated process team. This is a tough one to explain, but you know it when you hear it – and you hear it all the time.
“Before we book a restaurant for the Christmas party, we need to work the budget piece.”
Task/Tasker/Tasking – No self-respecting staff officer would confuse his tasks with his taskings, and neither should you. A task, as laid out in Army doctrine, is “a clearly defined and measurable activity accomplished by individuals and organizations.” In other words, it’s a thing you do. Taskings are a type of order, a direction to perform certain tasks. And taskers? Well, they’re the very lifeblood of the DoD action officer! That’s the boilerplate document, complete with tracking number and other administrative impedimentia, that serves to formally notify organizations of relevant taskings and monitor their responses. When you show up at your desk, you’ve got a tasker in the inbox that communicates a tasking, the execution of which involves the accomplishment of tasks. Simple enough, right?
“Seems like every time I get a tasker out the door, I’ve got ten more piled up waiting for my chop. I’m not even sure I understand the tasking on that one, but I think we’re getting stuck with some additional tasks.”
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