There’s a long history of the word “force” being used in a military context to mean a unit or organization or even an operational unit (Delta Force, Air Force, “an infantry force seized the hill”) and its plural, “forces,” used to refer collectively to military units of every sort (“American forces advanced,” “Joint American and British naval forces in action”).
But twice this week I’ve seen the Washington Post use “forces” as though they meant individual people. I can’t recall the first instance exactly, but today:
Pretty sure that attack involved several hundred people, but not several hundred organizations or units.
Am I nitpicking this or does this usage sound strange, even wrong, to others?
The fun really starts when the media clusters the forces into units, and then with a straight face uses the words as if anybody knows that they mean. “Turkey moved two battalions into Kurdish territory.” How many men in a battalion? A lot, but who gives a shit, they’re Turks. Wikipedia estimates that a battalion typically from about 300 to maybe 800, depending on the country’s military organization. OK, how many in Turkey. You think we have a man in Turkey – that was a freelance stringer, the only bilingual guy we got. Shut up, we have to run this ad for a drug you can take to prevent acid reflux when you order a pizza at midnight.
This is America, though, and forces count. So how many men in a US military battalion? Hands, anyone? Wiki again. 300-1,200. Whnaaa? More vague than Turks.
“Forces” seems like a really odd choice of words. As far as I recall that’s the first time I’ve seen it used and I pay quite a bit of attention to military reporting. I hope it stays a rare usage.
I do …but then I’ve commanded a battalion. Doctrinal terms for organizations involved are quite a bit more informative for me than vague hints from personnel strengths.
It doesn’t just vary by country. It varies by type of unit. It’s not even as simple as the same broad type of unit. Artillery battalions have manning built to specifically operate the type of artillery that battalion is equipped with. There can also be changes between units with the same equipment when the military is making organizational changes; some implement earlier than others. Units also task organize for missions. That can include being reinforced with certain elements and giving up others to create yet another unique number.
A reporter told “two battalions” without a lot more information can’t just look up an accurate translation to personnel. They’d be guessing.
Exactly my point. How is saying “two battalions” different from saying “a bunch of soldiers”? He is quoting an original source, using a word whose meaning is known only to the original source. Calling them battalions did nothing more than to clarify “Oh, he means men with guns”, and impressed the audience with “We know military talk (even if we don’t know what the words mean)”.
My quibble here is not with the military or its traditional organization. It is with the he news media, which feeds us incomprehensible gibberish and pats itself on the back for its daring investigative journalism, which falls short of even looking words up in the dictionary before they repeat them.
Back to the OP, the quoted use of “forces” there, to me, would be a unified contingent of trained and armed military personnel acting under the command of a sovereign administration. There was a time when the would be called “army” or “navy”, but most nations have combined those and others into what they call “forces” in which the various branches have overlapping duties. Canada has renamed all their defense structure “Canadian Forces”, and when we are invaded by the huns from the north, they will just be “Canadian forces”.
It’s different because there are two bunches of soldiers instead of one. Anyway, I don’t see what is wrong with the report, assuming there were, in fact, two battalions and the reporter verified this with an independent source.
I don’t see a problem with this. It may be incomprehensible gibberish to you, but there are people out there who are following the war in detail, who know about the Turkish army, and who care whether it’s one battalion or two. That probably includes the journalist who wrote the original report.
News doesn’t have to be dumbed down to the level of the most ignorant possible reader. It doesn’t have to be deliberately made vaguer when there is specific information available.
I suspect that the term forces is used here to describe the more fluid or extended types of military formations currently in use in Syria. As I understand it, any group of fighters might be made up of a few foreign professional soldiers (ie western or Russian or Iranian special forces), a local army such as the Kurds or the Syrian army or the Iraqi army, perhaps some local militia and just some locals for situational awareness. So a couple of Special Forces soldiers might have 20 people around them who they are advising but not commanding. When the western press discusses the action they are interested in the 2 Operators, not the far more numerous combatants. So by describing those 2 as forces, it clarifies that there are more people involved than the 2 westerners without discussing who those people are.
