'Optics' - Military's new buzzword

Lexicon of war has a new buzzword

Every modern conflict seems to throw up some new military-speak. The latest is 'optics'

 

Optical fibres resemble fireworks, an explosion, or even the nightly anti-aircraft fire over Libya, leading some pundits to use the word 'optics' to describe public perception of modern war. Photograph: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis

From collateral damage to friendly fire and from axis of evil to mission creep, the language of war and diplomacy tends to attract jargon and euphemism as a battlefield attracts flies.

And the buzzword of the Libyan saga so far appears to be optics - as used by unnamed ministers who have admitted that "the emotional optics of cruise missiles raining down, backed by coalition military briefings, [have] unwelcome echoes of Iraq".

Elsewhere, others have warned against "the optics of waging war in another Arab state after the Iraq fiasco", and reached for "the optics of consensus".

So what does optics mean? Put simply, it appears to be political shorthand for public perception; how the man in the street sees the strategies and actions of the powerful.

Like so many buzzwords, optics seems to have originated in Washington, presumably deep inside the Beltway.

In September 2009, the late US journalist William Safire noted that " 'optics' is hot, rivalling content".

Its usage, however, is older even than that. An article in the New York Times magazine last year traced the phrase back to the tail end of the 70s.

On 31 May 1978, the Wall Street Journal quoted Jimmy Carter's special counsellor on inflation, Robert Strauss, as saying that business leaders who went along with Carter's anti-inflation measures might be invited to the White House as a token of appreciation.

"It would be a nice optical step," Strauss said. The Journal was not impressed by the idea: the following day, an editorial rebuffed Strauss's overtures with the line "Optics will not cure inflation."

According to the author of a article in the Boston Globe almost three years ago, the continuing appeal of optics lies in its "associative resonance".

The word, Jan Freeman wrote, "invokes a whole set of tech-and-science terms like 'physics,' 'statistics' and 'tectonics', as well as Greek-derived high-concept nouns like 'hermeneutics', 'aesthetics' and 'pragmatics', all with an aura of brainy precision."

To the public, though, the frequent deployment of optics may end up having the opposite effect, smacking as it does of looking through a glass, darkly rather than through something clean and transparent.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/mar/22/optics-new-military-war-buzzword