We see in the news from time to time reference to “our guys” – whatever country they are from so long as they are on the right side – having to cope with the horrors of IEDs – i.e. Improvised Explosive Devices – produced and placed by the “bad guys.”
Why are they never called “Land Mines”? Is it just because they are not commercially and mass-produced by modern weapons-producing countries, or is there some substantive difference that will keep them forever justifiably disparaged as somewhat amateurish?
What psychological need is being being met by this circumlocution on the part of our press, or military leaders?
Because IEDs aren’t exclusively land mines but any explosive device cobbled together from available resources to make a bomb suitable for the task at hand.
In this way, they are improvised, explosive devices so they don’t necessarily have a manufactured name, number or manufactured plans to identify it as anything but “homemade”.
Well, the phrase “land mine” has a pretty specific mental image to it, and the definition includes it being hidden on or under the ground. You wouldn’t call a backpack containing a pressure cooker loaded with screws and explosives a “land mine”, probably, but that’s a nice solid example of an IED.
And the fact that they’re improvised is part of why they’re so traumatizing. A manufactured land mine looks like a land mine. You don’t see very many of those in everyday life. An IED looks like a discarded piece of trash. A veteran comes back and sees some litter, and freaks out.
Well, some IEDs actually use landmines as the “E” part.
Back to the OP : on top of the military-industrial overtones of the word, “land mine” also tends to imply a “land” component, and some sort of pressure trigger.
IEDs can be triggered by anything depending on the skill and whimsy of their builder, from radio signals & cellphones to push buttons on a long wire to pressure plates, even to cartoon-style burning fuses or kerosene trails. They’re also not always on or under the ground - apparently (cite: shooting the shit with a Marine over the interwebs) in Iraq the rebels were pretty adept at duct taping little gifts behind highway safety rails, often between the time the EOD vehicles cleared the road and the time the actual convoys rolled past.
IEDs also vary a lot in what exactly they do or are designed to do - some are built to shower people with shrapnel, some to destroy vehicles, some to destroy infrastructure & crater roads, start fires, some are small and used as booby traps… so, yeah, “IED” covers a lot more strategic ground than “land mine”.
So why not “homemade bomb”? I think Pasture is right to point out that IED is a euphemism, and, like all euphemisms, is designed to conceal and distract from what is really going on.
The term started off as military-speak, in the British Army IIRC, with reference to explosive devices use by the IRA. The military love their three-letter acronyms, of course but, apart from that, I don’t think this one functions to euphemise so much as to normalise. Terrorist tactics are pretty scary - that’s the point, really - and calling the thing an IED rather than a homemade bomb have overtones suggesting to soldiers that, yes, we know about these, we have protocols for dealing with them, etc, etc.
It means its not a standard landmine. Its also means its a great danger to the personnel who set it, as the trigger mechanism is not properly engineered… its a desperado or terrorists weapon. So they are not using a euphemism to make it seem worse than it is…
There are various sorts of triggers, and various explosives. They call an an IED to be sure that they don’t say “its a standard XYZ model 123 land mine !”. It may be based on that, but its been improvised in someway, so that nothing can be assumed about it… with nothing to be assumed its the same as an IED… assume nothing.
Saying that a company “downsized” is a euphemism for laying off a bunch of people. “Disposition Matrix” is a euphemism for a kill list.
But IED is an acronym for the term “Improvised Explosive Device”, which isn’t a euphemism. They’re not land mines- they’re literally improvised explosive devices, and calling them “land mines” is equally inaccurate as what the OP is suggesting is going on.
It’s a goofy sounding and clinical expression to be sure, but it’s completely accurate and not trying to beat around the bush at all.
If the military was encountering “land mines”, there is/was plenty of stuff deployed to take care of them - mine plows, metal detectors, etc… But IEDs are more sneaky stuff; they’re not nearly so easy to detect, and their effects are variable.
I don’t know – because of press releases, when I hear “IED,” I immediately think of getting blown to a bloody pulp, losing limbs, and PTSD. When I hear “IED” it almost emblematizes the very violence and uselessness built into occupying Iraq.
I have a low tolerance for euphemisms or unnecessarily technical terms, but I can’t think of a better way to talk about these things. Homemade bomb implies an amateurishness that they don’t have, and landmine refers to something that is explicitly buried and meant to keep people from entering a specific place.
Well, then, if they’re not amateurish, and they are basically static explosive devices intended for offensive use, do we not have the long-established term “booby-trap” to refer to them?
It seems to me that, just possibly, the “I” in IED is telling us, basically, that this is a weapon typically fabricated and used by irregular forces, rather than by regular forces who tend to buy their hardware from respectable arms dealers. If that’s so, maybe the intent is not so much euphemistic as propagandistic. “IED” calls our attention not so much to the weapon as to the people who use it.
No, we don’t. While some IEDs are booby-traps, not all of them are.
Not all booby-traps are IEDs and not all IEDs are booby-traps. The words are not interchangeable. It would be like saying "Some mustangs are cars, so we should call every car a mustang even though not all cars are actually mustangs and not every mustang is actually a car. It could mean a horse, after all.
Calling an IED an IED is not about propaganda. It is about accuracy and brevity.
Yeah, I’m glad if this distinction has died. It’s not a useful distinction to make, because whether you read individual letters, or as a word, can differ from person to person (e.g. “URL”).
