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Friday, March 28, 2014

STAR FLEET TERMS

PART ONE OF THREE
        

404: While the source is lost to history, this means "no clue." It might be used to describe a senior officer ("The Captain is 404") or to answer a question ("The Klingon deployment is 404").
 

Adminisphere: The layer of organization including theater headquarters and political leadership. Orders and policies originating in the Adminisphere are for all practical purposes irrelevant to the current situation.
         

Asymmetrical Dominance: Attacking the enemy's weakest element with our most expendable type of unit.
     

Back-Stop: What you will do when your plan inevitably collapses. This is designed to convince headquarters that all is well and they should leave you alone. Usually this means assigning a unit that is busy doing something else the task of covering your failure if it happens (e.g., and if a few Klingon raiders slip through our lines, the police can round them up). Simply because someone (i.e., the Scapegoat) has been assigned to fix your mistake means that your plan can be allowed to go forward.
     

Bells & Whistles: Added features to a system, plan, starship, or presentation that don't accomplish anything but which sound good to people who don't understand the real technologies or issues. This is taken to mean adding enough features to a plan or mission that nobody will notice it won't work anyway.
       

Blamestorming: Officers in a higher headquarters discussing why a mission failed and who will get the blame. The selected Scapegoat must be someone who lacks any powerful friends or embarrassing dirt on senior officers.
      

Canine-Equestrian Theater: While the original derivation is lost to history, the term means to give a presentation to a higher headquarters (or visiting political dignitaries) including Bells & Whistles and/or Cheese sufficient to confuse them into thinking that you have everything under control.
       

Captaincy Pay: The bump in salary that mid-grade officers receive when leaving Star Fleet to work for Federation Express.
        

CEM: Career-ending move, such as failing to follow orders or discussing civilian pay scales where your commander can hear.
      

Cheese: Unnecessary but tasty details added to a briefing to keep the senior commander or visiting political dignitaries in the audience from realizing that the briefing doesn't make sense.
    

Cheesecon Five: The highest level of alert that visiting political dignitaries will be attending the next briefing and you need to load up the presentation with cheese.
         

Cluster: Gathering of military forces from several commands and/or allies with no one really in overall command.

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