perfidy

I haven't had a chance to listen to the news since this morning, though I see on the ever-useful Drudge Report that the ground war has started. Apparently, we are moving into the shock and awe phase of Gulf War II. So I have little to say about that, except that I hope it all moves swiftly, and that there are few casualties.

While I do like Brendan Fraser, and for the same reasons as Johnny, I don't think this disqualifies me from thinking that operation names have gone disctinctly cheesy over the last two decades. Back in the big one, we had cool names like ULTRA, Overlord, Barbarossa, Market Garden, and the like. Even into the Vietnam era, we still had names like Rolling Thunder. But starting around the invasion of Panama, we lost it. I understand that the military still uses a computer generated naming system for small operations - which results in names like Pave Blue (the research project that led to the F-117 Stealth Fighter), Elegant Lady, Tractor Rose, Forest Green, Senior Citizen, Island Sun and Black Light, White Cloud and Classic Wizard. But for the big ones, we come up with utter crap. Noble Eagle wasn't to bad, though even that leaves much room for improvement.

While I don't think that corporate sponsorship is the way to go, "Kotex sponsors operation Iraqi Freedom, because you can never be too sure." has a nice ring.