Clarity of purpose is a combat multiplier and central to mission command[i], yet anyone who has spent time in a large headquarters knows that language in the modern Army can sometimes resemble a map overlaid with too many graphics. Each symbol intended to clarify, but collectively obscuring the ground truth and making it harder to see what matters. We are using more words to say less, and sometimes nothing at all: orders, briefs, and discussions increasingly seek to synchronise effects, leverage partnerships, and optimise potential across a complex and challenging strategic environment while enabling teams to operate whenever, wherever, and with whomever required. The result is polished language that signals alignment and intellectual weight – but regularly obscures meaning. This paper offers a deliberately tongue-in-cheek look at that phenomenon: the proliferation of empty metaphors, inflated concepts, and managerial phrasing, and what it might mean for warfighting effectiveness.

The inspiration for this reflection comes in part from Harry Frankfurt’s 1988 essay On Bullshit[ii], a short but rigorous philosophical treatment of a word not particularly common in academic journals. Frankfurt argues that bullshit is not the same as lying. He asserts that the liar remains tethered to the truth and deliberately departs from it, whereas the bullshitter is indifferent to whether statements are true or false; this indifference is the defining characteristic. In reading Frankfurt, it becomes difficult not to recognise echoes of his idea in contemporary military discourse, where the obligation to brief and conceptually frame problems can outpace genuine understanding. That realisation provided the motivation and starting point for this paper.

One way to approach the issue is to develop a taxonomy of military bullshit. The first category is the empty metaphor[iii]. These are phrases that gesture toward complexity without offering testable meaning: operating in uncertainty, shaping conditions, or delivering effects at scale. Often, they combine convincingly with approved institutional language, producing formulations such as: ‘Army will leverage integrated partnerships to shape conditions across all domains in order to deliver decisive effects in an increasingly complex environment’. It is difficult to disagree with such statements, which is precisely the problem[iv], as they are expansive, adaptable, and largely immune to disproof.

The second category is concept inflation[v]. This occurs when ideas are repeatedly repackaged and elevated through modifiers such as joint, integrated, partnered, and multi-domain. Army operates ‘on the land, from the land and onto the land, across all domains’ as part of the joint team, while Defence must continually adapt and evolve to meet a changing strategic environment. Yet when every activity is framed as integrated and adaptive, the terms risk becoming descriptive wallpaper rather than analytical tools[vi]. A plan quickly becomes an effort to ‘optimise capability across an integrated enterprise to enable outcomes’, suggesting transformation while describing little that is new.

A third category comprises hollow constructs[vii]. Terms like targeting, culture, and potential are central to institutional thinking and genuinely important and yet are often described or misapplied in ways that expand rather than clarify. Targeting must be both precise and adaptive across domains; culture must anchor behaviour while simultaneously enabling change. In practice, these formulations tend to expand until they are capable of meaning almost anything, while specifying almost nothing about what is actually to be done differently in the next activity or task. When a concept can comfortably describe everything from barracks discipline to joint fires synchronisation, it risks becoming less a guide to action than a reassuring slogan; one that sounds authoritative, travels well in briefs, and leaves just enough ambiguity for everyone to quietly interpret it in their own way. Yet such formulations often stop short of specifying how they translate into action. When a concept can accommodate anything and everything, it risks guiding nothing in particular.

Closely related is the overuse of tactical terminology for rhetorical effect. Words like decisive, synchronised, shaping, and effects once had precise analytical meaning (and doctrinally still do). When used liberally, they become verbal amplifiers. Army is a ‘versatile, decisive force’ that ‘integrates capabilities and delivers results’ through ‘teaming behaviours’. Entire passages can read like a synchronisation matrix converted into prose, with each activity decisive and every effect coordinated. The reader is left reassured that something important is happening, without being entirely sure what.

Finally, there is the seepage of corporate and managerial language into military discourse. As one critique observes, jargon often emerges to make simple ideas sound sophisticated, spreading across organisations. Defence writing increasingly reflects this tendency: capability is leveraged, outcomes are delivered, and potential is optimised across the enterprise. The cumulative effect is to replace directness with abstraction. Tasks become outcomes, action becomes effect, and responsibility becomes diffused.

At its extreme, this produces a kind of linguistic symphony that is as impressive as it is incomprehensible. I recall, as a commanding officer, a briefing from a higher HQs that confidently stated something along the lines that we would ‘synchronise cross-domain effects by leveraging joint and partnered capabilities to shape the operational environment in advance of decisive activity, while simultaneously enabling adaptive team-based innovation across the enterprise’. I remember looking around the room, half expecting someone to translate. No one did, and we all nodded, which seemed the safest course of action.

On another occasion, a draft planning directive informed subordinate units that they were to ‘generate readiness by optimising human capital to deliver capability outcomes aligned to evolving strategic objectives in a contested environment’. After a moment’s reflection, someone quietly asked whether this meant ‘train hard and be ready to deploy’. There was a sense that something important had just been lost in translation, possibly the entire paragraph. I would like to claim detached amusement at these moments, but the truth is less flattering… I have written versions of these sentences myself.

Now, it would be unfair to suggest that this problem exists only in conversation or informal briefings; it is also evident in some of our more formal strategy and concept documents. Consider the language of recent training and operational concepts, which describe the need to ‘unlock the full potential of our people’, ‘generate a qualitative edge’, and ‘synchronise multi-domain effects to create windows of advantage'. Each of these phrases is gesturing toward something important, yet none easily translates into a clear task for a junior commander. As previously mentioned, I have, on more than one occasion, been the author of sentences not entirely dissimilar. It is remarkably easy to be swept along by the current; by the newest concept, the latest popular phrasing, or the most compellingly branded idea. There is a professional gravity to phrases like integrated, multi-domain, or effects-based that is difficult to resist. They promise sophistication, alignment, and intellectual relevance. In reality, they often promise far more than they deliver. Recognising the problem is one thing; avoiding it is another entirely.

One is left wondering what this might look like in battle. It is difficult to imagine a section commander in the midst of a fighting withdrawal or attack turning to their team and confidently announcing ‘righto, we’re now going to synchronise cross-domain effects to generate a window of local advantage’. More likely, they would default to something short, aggressive, and directive; clipped fire orders delivered at volume and punctuated with the kind of colourful language that leaves no ambiguity about either the task or the urgency. The underlying ideas in these documents are often sound, but the language used to express them frequently expands beyond the point of practical utility. The result is not nonsense, but a kind of polished abstraction that works perfectly on a slide or in a paper yet becomes noticeably less helpful when translated into action at the point where clarity matters most.

Recently, the Deputy Chief of Army has warned that ‘managerial and advertising logic and double speak’ have ‘polluted the profession’, with jargon used to obscure ignorance and detach soldiers from war’s violent reality[viii]. He criticised euphemisms such as ‘deliver effects’, reminding us that the role of the Army is to ‘seek out, close with, kill, capture, seize, hold and repel attacks’[ix]. That contrast (between abstraction and reality) goes to the heart of the issue, and there is a larger professional risk. As one Army Journal article argues, unclear writing reflects unclear thinking, and in a military context, that has direct consequences for action[x]. Orders must be simple enough to be understood immediately: who goes where, when, and what they are to do when they get there. If officers think in phrases such as ‘interoperability frameworks’ and ‘persistent optimisation pathways’, the concern is not literary, it is operational. In many ways, this is also a sort of performative lexicon and informal acceptance of buzzword bingo, in which directors and staff ritualistically ‘circle back’ and ‘touch base’ and ‘pivot’ towards a ‘synergised paradigm shift’ to avoid direct expression. Such jargon serves less to clarify meaning than to signal competence, free up time, or obscure collective uncertainty. The humour and discomfort inherent in this mode of communication emerge most clearly when translated into plain English; for example, a directive to ‘strategically cascade the bandwidth to maximise blue-sky thinking’ is, in practice, an instruction to distribute loosely defined tasks in the hope that some marginally useful outcome eventuates.

Why does this flourish? Frankfurt suggests bullshit emerges when individuals are required to speak beyond what they know. This is a familiar condition in headquarters, where officers must brief complex issues under time pressure while projecting confidence. There is also a signalling function, as language demonstrates alignment and intellectual currency. To speak using the popular terms and phrases of the time signals membership in the institutional mainstream. Yet language fluency can be mistaken for depth of understanding. This matters because military language is operational. It is broadly acknowledged that culture, leadership, and behaviour shape capability and performance outcomes. If the language underpinning those functions becomes vague or performative, it risks degrading shared understanding. Unlike a lie, which can be challenged, inflated language is difficult to contest because it is rarely specific enough to be wrong. Military doctrine affirms the requirement for meaningful human control in the use of violence, and this mustn't become indistinct because terminology fails to specify how decisions are produced or who is accountable. Words decide who is responsible, who can act, and who is blamed when things go wrong[xi]. Unlike other institutional discourses, military discourse should be shaped by the demands of operational activity, where urgency, hierarchy, and consequence place a premium on clarity, efficiency, and the unambiguous exercise of authority.

A modest response to this issue is not to abandon higher-level concepts, but to impose discipline. There is an enduring story attributed to Napoleon, who would ask a corporal whether his plans made sense after briefing his commanders. If the corporal did not understand them, the plan was reworked. This works, and historical evidence is that if a plan cannot be understood by those expected to execute it, it is unlikely to succeed. If ‘leveraging integrated capability to deliver decisive kinetic and non-kinetic effects to achieve relative asymmetry in a complex environment’ cannot be translated into a clear direction for a junior leader, it may not be useful language at all.

Ultimately, the Army is not uniquely afflicted, but the consequences are uniquely serious. Warfare punishes ambiguity, as such, if we lose discipline in language (and I include myself squarely in that risk), we risk losing discipline in thinking. And in the profession of arms, reality has a way of cutting through language with remarkable efficiency.

End Notes

[i] ADF-P-0 Command, Edition 1, Commonwealth of Australia, 2024, 26-31

[ii] Frankfurt H, ‘On Bullshit’, Raritan Quarterly Review, 1986.

[iii] Empty Metaphor: A phrase that sounds meaningful but no longer explains anything, such that it signals meaning without substantively clarifying the concept it purports to describe.

[iv] Buckley R, ‘Fuzzy writing and fatalities’, Australian Army Journal, Vol 7 No. 2 Winter, 2010, 10.

[v] Concept Inflation: Progressive expansion and rebranding of a concept’s scope beyond its original bounds, such that it loses precision and explanatory utility while appearing to encompass an ever-widening range of use.

[vi] Patrick A, ‘The military is losing the war again business jargon’, Financial Review, 25 Feb 2025 

[vii] Hollow Constructs: Term, phrases or concepts that appears meaningful but lacks clear definition, real grounding, or explanatory value, serving mainly as a verbal placeholder rather than a substantive idea.

[viii] Smith C, Keynote Presentation - Chief of Army's History Conference, 19 Nov 2026.

[ix] Smith C, Keynote Presentation - Chief of Army's History Conference, 19 Nov 2026.

[x] Buckley R, ‘Fuzzy writing and fatalities’, Australian Army Journal, Vol 7 No. 2 Winter, 2010, 12-13. 

[xi]Annett E, Bitterman J, and Giordano J, ‘Precision in Words, Precision in Warfare: Terminology and Control in Military Discourse on Unmanned Systems’ Strategic Insights, Institute for National Strategic Studies, 11 Mar 2026.