Hacker News Reader

Comment by allturtles | Hacker News Reader

A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc? They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold: Thor, Dragon, Phoenix, Patriot, etc. It has happened to vehicles as well, which used to be named after venerated war leaders: Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP.

Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?

View on HN

It’s largely due to a move from single-branch designs to weapons “platforms” that are used by multiple branches of the armed forces so they now go through far more bureaucratic design processes. They had to do it because of the funding cuts after the end of the Cold War (although some systems like ATACMS predate that, both it and HIMARS just reflect a more bureaucratic army). HMMWV and MRAP though are generic terms, not really restricted to the US armed forces.

Designs that are ordered by a single branch like the USAF often still have the emotive names like the Predator and Reaper drones.

> Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?

I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.

The US Department of War and Department of the Navy were combined to form the Department of Defense. This separation imitated that in the United Kingdom, where the War Office administered the British Army, and the Admiralty administered the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines (and, later, the Air Ministry administered the Royal Air Force).

> You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in).

. . . because the American public ever since Desert Storm has demanded sanitized, bloodless wars. As soon as you have so-called "boots on the ground," it magically becomes a "quagmire." Yet everyone insists we prevent the next 9/11.

Combat vehicles still tend to get good names. American Indian tribes are traditional for helicopters, while ground combat vehicles still get named after troops & their leaders, like the new M10 Booker assault gun:

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/06/10/us-armys-new-com...

While it's entirely justifiable to name trucks after famous logistics officers or heroic motor transport drivers, it's just not done. Artillery is interesting, with Paladins (in action) and Crusaders (cancelled), but nobody refers to them by those names. Ships and subs are their own kettle of fish.

For World War 2 we relied on the British to name things (The US produced the M4 Medium Tank, the Brits called it the "Sherman"). The theory was they were government designed and (at least theoretically) produced by many companies.

I believe the Cold War names mostly came from US contractors- the government defined requirements ("air superiority fighter") and the contractors came up with designs that then had to be marketed against each other so they were given cool names ("Fighting Falcon").

Now there has been a lot of consolidation of contractors, and budgets are much more constrained. You no longer have the DoD funding competing designs and selecting, but a situation closer to early WW2 where the government is closer to the design.

At least that's my 5 minute guess, probably lots of 'citation needed' to be done.

>They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold

^True[1], and also planes also had cartoon character and naked women with big tits painted on them. Just google WW2 planes.

That might have to do with the life expectancy of the plane being about 20 minutes back then, but those are just details.

[1] https://archive.ph/X8GXA/9b82a68489e82ee6bbcb58761355a4c546e...

And sitting on an airfield for months at a time bored senseless, it used to be cool to paint insulting platitudes like "Eat this MOFO" on munitions. Now:

1) Blowing kids to smithereens must be done in a politically correct fashion, even while violating the Geneva convention.

2) Nobody is sure who the enemy will actually be next week, so it would be shame to have to repaint them.

I assure you the United States armed forces still write raunchy phrases on materiel.

> even while violating the Geneva convention.

Uhh . . . yeah, no. As someone who served, that's flat-out offensive.

You don't need to take umbridge because your story is not everyones story. Unless you're claiming to speak for every serving person on the planet since 1949?

Now think, what do you suppose is the reason someone getting chewed out for scribbling on a shell really is when those are being used in a dubious theatre? (hint: attribution) The absurdity is the real crime.

That was more a choice by individual aircrew than higher command or bureaucracy.

I'm inclined to give, at least, the mid- and late-war bomber crew guys a pass on just about any personal "bad" behavior short of the extremely bad, given their terrible odds of surviving the next few months...

More likely than not they're living their final few weeks, let them paint a pretty lady on the plane's nose.

Too late to edit, I meant early- and mid-war. It did get somewhat less horrifying closer to the end.

A somewhat silly response, but to me ATACMS sounds a lot like the plural of atack'em which is short for "atack them" in colloquial "American"

And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

For some reasons Americans like acronyms that spell words. Like SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) or PATRIOT act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)

> And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

Mars is also the Roman god of war.

Our servers used to be named after the Simpsons characters but now they are corp-us-web3 and dev-eu-sql2

Not just bureaucratic, but also give it an air of technological sophistication. It's not about pure power, but being more advanced than anything else. And over the years, the way in which weapon systems are developed, funded, and procured have changed--the DOD does less of its own R&D, and outsources everything to contractors.

ATACMS is usually pronounced "Attack 'Ems", FWIW.

> A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc?

Maybe because so many of them from the late Cold War on got cancelled between the stage where they would previously get a “friendly” (hostile?) name and deployment that they just stopped doing that as much and kept the development project name. But I think you exaggerate the significance of the change.

> Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP.

HMMWV was deployed during the late Cold War. And that name with the pronunciation “Humvee” is a lot like the classic GPW “Jeep”.

More similar to the M1 Abrams tank and M2 Bradley personnel carrier in the post-Cild War world are the (cancelled late in the program) M8 Buford armored gun system; the newer M10 Booker assault gun, the Stryker infantry carrier vehicle, etc. All of which got names.

> A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc? They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold: Thor, Dragon, Phoenix, Patriot, etc. It has happened to vehicles as well, which used to be named after venerated war leaders: Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP.

To avoid anything that might be deemed not diverse and not inclusive enough.

Any real names might make someone feel bad about something. A sequence of random letters does not.

Wrong. I can tell what you're mad about, and I find it petty.

Especially since all of those acronyms predate the current DEI wave by decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com