14 Military Operation Names That Are An Embarrassment to the National Security State
Churchill’s number one rule for naming military operations was that it shouldn’t be embarrassing to say out loud to a new widow. Imagine being told your husband was a casualty of “Exercise Steadfast Jazz.”
Operation Therapist
Men will literally conduct a series of cordons and searches to capture known insurgents outside of Tikrit in 2005 instead of going to therapy.
Operation Pig Bristle
In 1946, China was embroiled in a civil war. With the city of Chongqing completely cut off by Communist forces, the Australian Air Force swooped in and… smuggled out a bunch of pig hairs. You see, Australia had fallen on hard times, too — there was a national shortage of paint brushes, and Chongqing was their main source of bristles.
Exercise Tiger Thrust
Not to be confused with Exercise Tiger, the 1944 D-Day practice round that went horribly, unbelievably wrong and got 749 American soldiers killed. Exercise Tiger Thrust was a little training exercise in the 1980s for a Louisiana Air Force base’s “Flying Tigers.”
Operation Lucky Alphonse
“Lucky Alphonse” sounds like a racehorse that smokes an unfiltered cigarette during his race and cools down with a shot of cheap scotch, but it was actually an embarrassing military blunder by the British Armed Forces. While trying to quell a Greek nationalist insurgency in Cyprus, a forest fire started and killed 30 soldiers.
Operation Cajun Mousetrap III
Please, Operation Cajun Mousetrap III was my father’s name. Call me “nighttime raid to assess the capabilities of the Anti-Iraqi Forces in Samarra in 2004.”
Operation Red Bean
It sounds like an exhausted parent attempting to make a toddler try a new food, but it was actually the Belgians teaming up with the French to secure an airport in Zaire during the 1978 Battle of Kolwezi.
Team Spirit
Tragically, not a mission to airdrop Nirvana into the DMZ in 1991, but an ongoing U.S. and South Korean training operation that ended in 1993.
Operation Black Ferret
It sounds like a little boy pestering his parents for a dog but ultimately settling on a caged stink weasel. In fact, it was a Marine search-and-destroy mission in Vietnam’s Quang Ngai Province in 1965.
Exercise Steadfast Jazz
It’s not a doofus father trying to get the family to go to the local jazz and blues fest, as the name implies. It was only slightly more exciting than that: the culmination of a bunch of NATO Response Force drills in 2013.
Operation Mermaid Dawn
It sounds like something you might get airbrushed on a T-shirt on a girls’ trip to the Jersey Shore, but it was actually a Libyan rebel attack on Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 (“Mermaid” was well-known to all involved as a nickname for Tripoli).
Exercise Dynamic Mongoose
This is an annual NATO exercise where thousands of soldiers from 10 countries wade out into Norway’s ocean and prepare for sea- and space-based attacks. As far as I can tell, mongoose are neither native to Stavanger, Norway, nor adequately prepared for seabased ballistic threats.
Operation Paul Bunyan
This was a dick-measuring contest waged jointly by America and South Korea. After North Koreans killed two U.N. command officers who were trimming a poplar tree in the demilitarized zone, they enacted Operation Paul Bunyan to roll in a ton of military vehicles just to cut down the tree.
Operations Dragon Blanc, Noire, Rouge and Vert
These may be what George R.R. Martin calls his attempts to come up with the big twist in The Winds of Winter, but they were also a series of attempts to rescue Congolese hostages in 1964. In some cases, Belgian paratroopers landed mere minutes too late to save civilian hostages.
Operation Nimrod
The British Special Air Services successfully rescued hostages from the Iranian embassy in London in 1980. Also, your mom called from the maternity ward, she said Operation Nimrod was a success.
