Someone who believes JADE HELM 15 is an operation to take over Texas (or something like that) posted that JADE HELM stands for JOINT ASSISTANT for DEPLOYMENT and EXECUTION / HOMELAND ERADICATION OF LOCAL MILITANTS.
The JADE part sounds reasonable. The military does deployments, and they execute operations. The second part evokes laughter if I’m not careful. (Note: IMO the actual wording of JADE sounds too clumsy to be real.)
(Let me look something up so that I know I can post it…) Right. In my experience, secret projects have names that have no connection to what they are. For example, HAVE BLUE. You can guess what a different project called HAVE [redacted] is. But if you don’t know what a ‘HAVE’ project is, you can’t figure it out by the name. On the other hand, operations (as opposed to ‘programs’, as I knew them) have names that make some sense. DESERT STORM, for example. I haven’t run across any acronyms.
So is JADE HELM a code name that means nothing (like HAVE BLUE)? Or is it meaningful in the way DESERT STORM is? I’d bet money it’s not an acronym, but please LMK if I’m wrong.
Seems to me that if the government were planning a secret operation to crack down on domestic dissidents, they wouldn’t hide clues in the name of the operation.
It does tickle me in that “jade flute” has a particular meaning in Chinese erotica - as in, you probably like having your partner ‘play your jade flute.’ Helm, helmet - doesn’t help.
According to a Tom Clancy novel (Cardinal of the Kremlin or Debt of Honor, can’t recall which one), there’s a “great big naming computer” that assigns random names to things like this.
The requestor can customize it and/or reject proposed names if they’re too close to the classified subject matter (for example).
The other thing of note about the naming of exercises is that they only use the year if it is a recurring event. Since this is officially Jade Helm 15, I assume that Jade Helm has been used before, or it is planned to recur in the future. I took part in exercise Jackal Stone 10, back in 2010(duh). That exercise was a joint training exercise with special forces troops from Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. It has been conducted every year, and always with Eastern European NATO nations. Others that happen annually are Baltops, and Cobra Gold, an annual training exercise with Thailand. One offs, like Desert Storm, don’t have years attached to them.
At least back in the day, operation names were indeed random. A given command or formation was assigned an adjective, which was followed by a randomly chosen noun.
One year our adjective was “Imperial.” That sounds cool, but we all laughed about how the random word system would probably send us out on a training ex called “Operation Imperial Margarine.” (Imperial Margarine is a popular brand of the stuff here.) Sure enough a few months later, out we went on Operation Imperial Margarine.
Stuff like “Desert Storm” or “Iraqi Freedom” is, indeed, politically directed. And it is true that operations can be descriptive. Jade Helm sounds random as hell to me.
In typical DoD practice, the first word is a category. So all things JADE might be stateside military exercises or some such. I do not know what the JADE category actually means.
The second word is always simply an arbitrary word picked from a list of approved words spit out by an NSA randomizer. It means nothing exactly on purpose. That way bad guys can’t infer anything from the names JADE HELM vs. JADE BLUEBIRD vs. JADE PIZZA.
During my Cold War days if the duty NCO banged on your door at 0300 yelling, “Lariat Advance!” It meant grab all your crap, Russia is attacking. As far as I know it was totally random.
Random mission names can be changed to sell a high-profile/controversial mission to the public. The U.S. invasion of Panama was called “Operation Blue Spoon” before being renamed “Operation Just Cause” for political reasons.
It might be in one of those too, but I recall the topic of randomizing operation names came up in Hunt for Red October, where the name assigned was something musical – Mandolin, IIRC – which results (slightly humorously) in Jack Ryan sending messages back to the CIA “coded” by belaboring the mandolin concert theme: e.g., “concert scheduled for tonight, expect positive reviews” (made contact, going OK but not final success) or “concert went well, excellent reviews” (success).
I’m not aware of any other exercise using the term “Jade.”
One somewhat analagous exercise for Army Special Operations Command is Robin Sage, in which A-teams are deployed to parts of North Carolina – excuse me, “Pineland” – for a capstone exercise.
Like was mentioned earlier, I think the convention of having the first word be descriptive of a category of things is not as readily applied to exercises. As was said before, we’ve all heard of Cobra Gold in Thailand, but I’m not familiar with a Cobra Chicken in the Philippines or a Cobra Hooker in… well, that would probably be in Thailand, too.
