“If you would converse with me,” Voltaire is supposed to have said, “define your terms!”
Several new military dictionaries make it easier to define elusive or obscure military terms.
The Department of Defense has updated (for the second time this year) its massive “Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms,” Joint Publication 1-02, through 17 September 2006 (752 pages, 2.2 MB PDF file).
It explains that a “blast wave,” for example, is “a sharply defined wave of increased pressure rapidly propagated through a surrounding medium from a center of detonation or similar disturbance.”
But what is it in French?
For that one must turn to another new dictionary prepared by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which not only defines thousands of military terms (“blowback,” “laser guided weapon,” etc.) but also provides translations into Voltaire’s language.
So, one learns, “blast wave” is “onde de souffle.”
See “NATO Glossary of Terms and Definitions (English and French),” North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2006 (344 pages, 3.5 MB).
And for good measure there is also a new “NATO Glossary of Abbreviations Used in NATO Documents and Publications,” 2006 (432 pages, 1.4 MB).
It is in the interests of the United States to appropriately protect information that needs to be protected while maintaining our participation in new discoveries to maintain our competitive advantage.
The question is not whether the capital exists (it does!), nor whether energy solutions are available (they are!), but whether we can align energy finance quickly enough to channel the right types of capital where and when it’s needed most.
Our analysis of federal AI governance across administrations shows that divergent compliance procedures and uneven institutional capacity challenge the government’s ability to deploy AI in ways that uphold public trust.
From California to New Jersey, wildfires are taking a toll—costing the United States up to $424 billion annually and displacing tens of thousands of people. Congress needs solutions.