NORAD drops terms

[Waya]

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colorado Springs, Colo. - The word ''warrior'' is out, and ''phantom'' is in. The term ''brave'' has been replaced by ''dart,'' and ''Indian'' has been changed to ''sabre.''

As in ''sabre rattling,'' another term for military exercises.

The U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command recently changed the names of some of their key military exercises to drop words that American Indians may find insulting or degrading.

NORAD, whose mission is to thwart terrorist air attacks over North America, unintentionally jumped into the ''political correctness'' fray just as the national battle heated up over Indian nicknames and ''mascots'' as sports symbols.

The military name changes were revealed in a July internal memo from command headquarters to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Joint Chiefs and other senior personnel. The memo was leaked to The Washington Times, which broke the story Aug. 11.

The timing was coincidental, said NORAD spokesman Master Sgt. John Tomassi.

''This has been in the plans for over a year and, unfortunately - or fortunately - it just happened to come out at the same time the NCAA was having their debate about this whole thing. It was not meant to be any big story, it was just, 'OK, we're changing the names,' but somehow the memo got out and here we are in the midst of a controversy,'' Tomassi said, adding that it was not a bad place to be.

The names have been used since the 1970s' Cold War days.

''They follow a Native American theme, and we looked at them and then we looked into the regulations and found we shouldn't be using those names, because the regs say we shouldn't be using any names that could be construed to be disparaging. It probably wasn't taken into consideration back then,'' Tomassi said.

There were essentially four words that needed to be exorcised - ''warrior,'' ''chief,'' ''brave'' and ''Indian.''

''Warrior'' was problematic.

''Warrior could be construed as anything. We actually call ourselves 'warrior' in the military,'' Tomassi said.

The decision was made to adopt a new theme - the names of retired military aircraft....

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411424

[Massacure]

1. Terrorist Air Attacks? WTF?