MMA: Mendacious Military Acronym

We are given to understand that IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, the things that Iraqi insurgents use to blow away US troops. There’s just one problem: there is nothing improvisatory about them. I heard a radio interview with a high level U.S. military guy who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He described how the people who create these “improvised” devices have adapted them to changing defenses. For example, the devices used to be hard-wired. So the U.S. started training guys to spot the wires. So the IED developers switched to wireless. The U.S. started armouring the vehicles more heavily (a stroke of genius there, don’t you think?), so the IED dudes started packing bigger payloads. To my mind, this is anything but improvised — it is carefully planned, deliberate, systematic, methodical.

Here’s what the improvised in IED really stands for. It means whoever built it had the audacity to build it himself instead of being a good citizen and buying it from a respectable, world-class arms dealer such as France, China, Russia, Israel, or the USA.