The military bureaucracy has never met an abbreviation or acronym it didn't like.
From admirals and generals to the lowest seaman recruit or private, no one in uniform nor any civilian who visits a base can escape the maze of sometimes mysterious letters that have become dialect unto themselves.
"Sometimes an acronym takes on a life of its own and becomes a noun," said retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Duane Thiessen, president of the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation in Pensacola. A veteran aviator, he explained, "For instance, foreign object damage, FOD, is something that happens when a jet engine picks up a rock or small piece of metal and damages an internal compressor or turbine blade."
Speaking less technically, I was once an RA soldier stationed in the RV in a unit called HQUSARV, with the rank of SP5 and looking forward to my ETR, or at least some R&R. But first I had to earn my TOVCR.
To decode: I was a Regular Army trooper in the Republic of Vietnam, stationed at Headquarters of the U.S. Army in the Republic of Vietnam in Long Binh, with the enlisted rank of Specialist 5, looking forward to my Estimated Time of Rotation back to the states, or a least some Rest and Relaxation leave. But along the way, I had to be there in the chaotic period of early 1968 for which I received a Tet Offensive Vietnam Campaign Ribbon.
For more of a challenge, you may want to tackle the acronym identification quiz that accompanies this story.
My personal examples are from four decades ago, and since then the pace of minting new armed-forces acronyms has only increased. Consider that the Navy immediately coined an acronym in March for a new security system in the announcement of its very existence. The headline in the Pensacola Naval Air Station newspaper read: "NASWF advances security through NACMS."
That's the Navy's way of saying that Naval Air Station Whiting Field has some new software that can read and show the information from military identification cards on portable displays: the Navy Access Control Management System.
If the acronyms in the base newspaper, called Gosport, seem a bit tortured, remember that the publication's name itself is a series of letters formed from the English town once known as God's Port. That's where a voice tube used by flight instructors in the early days of Naval aviation was invented. Thus the moniker of the aviation base's current news medium is derived from a rudimentary flight communication method.
The idea for early military acronyms was conceived to make shorthand sense of a series of words. Thus we have radar, which stands for radio detecting and ranging.
Some acronyms endure because of tradition, such as CAG, said Hill Goodspeed, a historian at the National Naval Aviation Museum. "CAG harkens back to the days when the group of squadrons assigned to a particular carrier made up an Air Group. The commanding officer was known as Commander, Air Group, or CAG."
Today the CAG acronym still exists even though the specific units from which it originated have long since vanished. Goodspeed explained, "In the early '60s, air groups became known as air wings. Using 'Carrier Air Wing 8' as an example, the commander of an air wing is officially known as COMCARAIRWING Eight. However, an air wing commander is still called CAG."
But Goodspeed recalled one acronym that disappeared abruptly. It stood for Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, or CINCUS.
"When Adm. Ernest King received orders to this position on Dec. 30, 1941, just over three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of his first steps was to change the acronym of the command to COMINCH because when one pronounced CINCUS, it sounded like "sink us."
Some military supervisors are so used to the acronym culture that they adopt their own. Harry White, a civilian public affairs officer at Pensacola Naval Air Station, recalled that when he was on active duty in the Air Force, "I had a boss who insisted on everyone signing out each time we left the office, stating our TOD, destination and ETR. I spent hours coming up with acronyms to describe my reason for being out and destination. It became something of a game for the office to figure out what the acronym meant."
Ironically, military acronyms were born to make day-to-day duties simpler and to clarify communications. But some personnel at Pensacola Naval Air Station readily admit they can't immediately identify the meaning of some signs on the base.
Some acronyms are mystifying at first. Thiessen cited CONUS, for Continental United States, and OCONUS, for Outside Continental United States. "They work inside the military, but when used by civilian moving companies that are contracted to move us, it is often a point of confusion," he said. "In my PCS, or permanent change of station, move from the Republic of Korea to CONUS, I was repeatedly asked where CONUS was in the U.S."
What's more, acronyms can be too similar to be clear. "A MEB is bigger than a MEU and smaller than a MEF, but all three are MAGTFs," said Thiessen.
Translation: A Marine Expeditionary Brigade is bigger than a Marine Expeditionary Unit and smaller than a Marine Expeditionary Force, but all three are Marine Air Ground Task Forces. "And each has a CE, GCE, ACE and SE," said Thiessen, meaning a Command Element, Ground Combat Element, Air Combat Element and Support Element."
If you're making sense of all of this as a reader, you're probably what the military calls RFI, or "ready for issue." If you aren't, then you're NRFI.
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Acronym quiz
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