Complex Operations Lexicon

This lexicon is intended as a tool to help strip away one source of the endemic miscommunication and friction that now plagues both soldiers and civilians, government and non-government, who plan, coordinate, and execute the complex set of overlapping civil-military activities and tasks that have come to characterize armed conflicts and their aftermath. Collectively known as complex operations1, they demand, but too often lack, a sense of common purpose and mutual understanding between a wide array of planners and practitioners, all of whom bring with them different organizational cultures, world visions, and operational approaches. These disconnects can, and too often do, create confusion, at times with tragic results, both on the ground and among policy-makers. Part of that confusion stems from the widely varied vocabulary used by these many actors. Each organization possesses their own unique terminology, perfectly clear to them, but foggy to others. Even when words look and sound familiar they often have quite different and sometimes alien meanings. Anyone who has attended an acronym and jargon-laced coordination meeting of military, civilian government, and NGO representatives knows the frustration of trying to interpret what is meant by words that have many different connotations. It is in hopes of lessening this confusion that this lexicon has been compiled. By providing a list of terms and their definitions, as well as many of the acronyms, used by both military and civilian actors in complex operations, the following pages offer a means to translate what others are saying. The lexicon does not strive to establish a single agreed meaning for each term. Indeed, such a list may well be unrealistic if not impossible, and certainly beyond the scope of this publication. Rather, each word or phrase includes one or more definitions reflecting various organizational vocabularies. In that way the meaning of a term employed by one may become understandable to another. This lexicon thus takes no stance; it records the definitions of the many terms used in complex operations, in all their variations. In short, it seeks to provide a reference tool with which practitioners may look up a word or phrase and ensure that its meaning as intended by the user is clear.