> Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?
I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.
The US Department of War and Department of the Navy were combined to form the Department of Defense. This separation imitated that in the United Kingdom, where the War Office administered the British Army, and the Admiralty administered the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines (and, later, the Air Ministry administered the Royal Air Force).
> You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in).
. . . because the American public ever since Desert Storm has demanded sanitized, bloodless wars. As soon as you have so-called "boots on the ground," it magically becomes a "quagmire." Yet everyone insists we prevent the next 9/11.
I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.