Yesterday, I questioned a media description of Operation Swarmer as the “biggest attack since the Iraqi invasion.” Today, the media is questioning itself and finding its own coverage overblown because of a lack of understanding of American military terminology.
It was billed by the US military as “the largest air assault operation” since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, with attack and assault aircraft providing “aerial weapons support” for 1,500 US and Iraqi commandos moving in to clear “a suspected insurgent operating area north-east of Samarra.”
The international news agencies immediately rang the urgent bells on the story.
Around the world, programmes were interrupted as screens flashed the news, which dominated the global media agenda for the next 12 hours or more.
[…]
By the middle of Day Two, the operation had already been scaled down to 900 men.
Operation Swarmer clearly bore no comparison in scale to the initial attack which brought down Saddam Hussein’s regime, or to the massive assault on the insurgent stronghold in the city of Falluja in November 2004.
Nor did it appear to match a series of counter-insurgency operations involving air strikes and ground forces in remote areas near the Syrian border in western Iraq last year.
In one four-day campaign last May, the US military said it had killed 125 insurgents for the loss of nine of its own men killed and 40 injured.
So how and why did this latest apparently routine combing operation, yielding a few arms caches and netting some low-grade suspects, manage to win stop-press coverage around the world?
The use of the phrase “the largest air assault operation” was clearly crucial, raising visions of a massive bombing campaign.
In fact, all the phrase meant is that more helicopters were deployed to airlift the troops into the area than in previous such operations.
The 50 “aircraft” that had been deployed were not combat jets blasting insurgent targets, but helicopters ferrying in the forces. There was no rocketing or bombing from the sky.
In US military parlance, “air assault” means transporting troops into a combat zone by air. It could include, but does not necessarily imply, air strikes.
Ah yes, the media — get the story out, get it right later … maybe.