Word of the week: Warfighter
Shooting pains.
What kind of fightin’ word is warfighter, and why are we seeing it so much?
Our new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth — he of the American-flag pocket squares and the dubious judgment about group chats and nepotism — is fond of the word. In December 2024, when stories of his heavy drinking and sexual misconduct threatened to scuttle his confirmation1, Hegseth took to X to defend himself: “I’m doing this for the warfighters, not the warmongers,” he blustered above a photograph of himself in combat gear.2 He used warfighter three times in his confirmation-hearing opening statement to the Senate Armed Forces Committee on January 14. And he used warfighters in a February 21 “important message to American warfighters and American taxpayers”: “Ever since I’ve taken this position the only thing I care about is doing right by the warfighters, by the troops,” he said, garbling his verb tenses. (The r/military subreddit disparaged the speech as “a PR move designed to justify a blatant power grab.”)3
The official White House X account, which lately has been using ChatGPT to “troll its enemies and delight the MAGA faithful,” also likes warfighters.
And there are at least half a dozen WARFIGHTER brand names and registered trademarks from unrelated companies: coffee, beer, fuel treatments, recreational therapy, smoking products.
And, no surprise, a first-person-shooter video-game franchise.
It may have been the Warfighter game that sparked the first burst of public scrutiny of warfighter. In November 2012 linguist Mark Liberman devoted a Language Log post to the word warfighter and its critics, one of whom, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, had posted a mocking online review that included this line: “[Y]ou know, ‘Warfighter,’ because he just fights wars all over the place, and then he gets his tax return done by his friend Numbers Accountant.”
“I don't know anyone who didn't immediately laugh at this fucking name,” Croshaw concluded.
Liberman took mild exception:
The reason that no one involved in the game's development objected to the word “warfighter” is that the U.S. Defense Department has used “warfighter” as a standard term for military personnel since the late 1980s or early 1990s
Do read the entire post, which cites a 2003 New York Times article that explains that warfighter is more economical than saying or writing “soldier, sailor, marine, airman, and airwoman” over and over. Read the comments, too; they’re very good.
Word warriors have been worrying about warfighter for even longer than that, though. In a December 2001 post on his Wordspy blog, Paul McFedries expressed puzzlement:
If you search for this word on the web or in any news database, you get back a huge number of hits. And yet the word doesn’t appear in any of my dictionaries (the OED has war-fighting) and it immediately struck me as new when I first saw it a few weeks ago. How can a word be both popular and obscure? The answer, at least in this case, seems to be that the word’s popularity extends mostly to specific groups, such as the military (no surprise there), military hobbyists, and computer game players.
Nearly a quarter-century later, warfighter has oozed out of those “specific groups” — “The warfighter is a special breed of soldier,” Combat Journal had observed in 1987 — and into the general discourse. Its popularity in the Trump Restoration Era may reflect the Dear Leader’s general air of bellicosity and his “Fight, fight, fight” response to an attempted shooting during a 2024 campaign stop.4
As a replacement for the ambiguous troop — singular? collective? — warfighter has clarity on its side. And even a peacenik like me has to admit that warfighter has some attractions. It’s a compound of two short old words, war and fight, and as Winston Churchill put it, “Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all.” Moreover, fighter compounds are so plentiful in English — street fighter, freedom fighter, prizefighter, gunfighter, firefighter — that warfighter feels familiar, if not entirely friendly. The word originally appeared in England — in what was then called the Manchester Guardian and is now just The Guardian — in 1915: “war-fighters at the front” were contrasted with “war-workers at home.” Today, though, the OED says warfighter is “chiefly U.S. military.”
Not everyone in the U.S. military is gung-ho about it, though. The anonymous “Angry Staff Officer,” writing in April 2022, called warfighter a “monstrosity”:
Now, not only is this an assault on the English language in general – “I’m not a teacher, I’m a smartsgiver” – it is also patently and dangerously misleading. Why? Because it assumes that the sole role of the Army – and the military in general – is to only fight wars.
Indeed, as Rosa Brooks noted in her 2016 book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon5, “as the lines we have drawn between ‘war’ and ‘nonwar’ grow indistinct, the role and mission of the U.S. military have grown similarly hazy”:
American military personnel … analyze lines of computer code in Virginia office buildings, build isolation wards in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, operate health clinics in rural Malaysian villages, launch agricultural reform programs and small business development projects in Africa, train Afghan judges and parliamentarians, develop television soap operas for Iraqi audiences, and conduct antipiracy patrols off the Somali coast.
Of course, the current SecDef probably sneers at all that. As he said in that video “to the warfighters”: “In short, we want the biggest, most bad-ass military on the planet. On God’s green earth.” No girls allowed.
One more observation about warfighter, this time a linguistic one.
Warfighter is a compound word, but it’s a particular kind of compound, one that puts the modifier (in this case war) before a form of the verb (fight). This pattern is called “right-headedness,” which means the “head” of the word (fighter) appears to the right of the modifier (war). Most English compounds are formed this way: a booklover loves books, a toothbrush brushes teeth, a couch-fucker . . . well, you get the idea.
Linguist and technical editor Brianne Hughes calls these words backstabber compounds (what kind of stabber? a stabber of backs!) in contrast with the rarer type of compound she’s made a study of: cutthroat compounds. In a cutthroat compound — like, well, cutthroat — the “head” of the word, a verb, appears on the left. (“A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy, a scarecrow scares crows, a turncoat turns their coat, rotgut rots the gut, a pickpocket picks pockets, a sawbones saws bones (one of the few plural by default), and breakfast—lest you miss its etymology, hidden in plain sight—breaks a fast,” wrote Stan Carey in 2015.) If you wanted to turn backstabber into a cutthroat compound, you’d end up with stabback, which would be unusual and possibly un-English. Fightwars instead of warfighter? Understandable but unnatural-sounding.
Rest assured, however: there are plenty of cutthroat compounds that might be worked into a paragraph about the Trump Administration. Know-nothing was good enough to become the name of a whole political party in the 19th century. Lackbrains is another old one. Here’s one I just made up: grabgrift. Want to try your hand at an original cutthroat compound? Leave a comment.
No such luck. He was confirmed 51-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie.
Warmonger — literally a merchant of war — is a much older word than warfighter. It first appeared in print in 1590, in The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser, who may have coined the word. His meaning was different from ours, though: he meant “mercenary soldier.”
Excellent book; I’ve read it twice. Rosa Brooks is the daughter of the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich and the psychologist John Ehrenreich.
Squintvision
Peeknipple
Crushbug
One cutthroat word (in both senses) that I really like -- dreadnought!