Appropriate Use of The Term
Use of the term does not appear to have gained currency outside of the limited arena of justification of military action: for example, the U.S. Navy refers to the Korean conflict as the Korean War, and when they refer to police action, they surround the term in scare quotes.
Similarly, a plaque at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial refers to the Vietnam conflict as a war, not a police action.
Use of the term police action is intended to imply either a claim of formal sovereignty or of authority to intervene militarily at a nation's own discretion.
Veterans often display a high degree of disdain for the term "police action," as it somehow implies that their sacrifices were not legitimate and perhaps also that they are not even veterans of a true "war".
Read more about this topic: Police Action
Famous quotes containing the word term:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)