You'll often find the word "bullet" similarly misused, as in "I need some more bullets for my gun". The bullet is of course just the bit that gets fired out to the target, not the whole assembly in its un-fired state. The correct term then is "cartridges".

The confusion of bullets, cartridge cases, and cartridges is indeed very common, but at least it doesn't confuse the projectile with the weapon that fires it, as with the (seemingly) recent misuse of "mortar"!

A similar mistake would get a sports reporter in a lot of trouble. Sports reporters are expected to know what they're talking about.

And let's not forget the confusion between "clips" and "magazines".

how about ship and boat?

For at least a couple of decades, everything on tracks has been a "tank".

I once watched a news anchor have the poor judgement to ask an on-camera front-line reporter what an "RPG" was. The reporter screwed up her face and said "It's a really big gun."

My favorite? During the 1991 Gulf War, a U.S. military officer being interviewed by a young reporter made comparison to an event during WWII. Replied the reporter, "World War Two... there was another one, wasn't there."

A bit in the defense.

I am not a writer, nor an editor, nor in a position to have to be so anal. I am a soldier however, and a combat veteran on Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan.

My guess is that the reporters are getting their cues and jargon from the grunts.

It's easy to mistake incomming mortar fire, and incomming mortar rounds, with "incomming mortars".

Also, there is a matter of a member of one service branch knowing the correct nomenclature for another branch's gear. you can't expect a grunt to know the proper squidy term for their myriad different kinds of watercraft.

To me they are all boats.

And wether rotor wing or not, all aircraft are "birds".

After that it's just a blizzard of piss-5's, m-bitters, crazy-10's, kick-13's, NODs, arty, fa, fo, fob, predator, spector, talon, a-10's, 40 mike mikes, claymores, tracks, haji's, jowa's, ak's, pk's, rpg's, rpk's, "humm-vee", Hilux, F-O's, Tac-P's, D-boys, and my personal favorite...

Psy-ops.

btw, the U.S. army refers to it, when abbreviated as PSYOP. The U.S. army Civil Affairs - Psychological Operations Command also does not conduct PSY-WAR. (not anymore) The designation officialy is not used, it is all PSYOP. I know that it doesn't make any sense. If Special Operations is SpecOps, then why is Psychological Operations not PsyOps?

Dunno, that's just the way it is.

-DS
"the horns hold up the halo"

Not to mention the frequent use of "Battleship" to describe any/all types of Navy ship.

I suspect that some of it is unfamiliarity and/or laziness (such as a reporter referring to an AAA piece mounted on a truck as "thirty caliber" instead of "thirty millimeter"). Some of it has to be wilfull ignorance, though. I saw an anchor on one of the 24 hour news channels describing the video being shown as "F-117 stealth fighters launching from the USS XXXXX (insert carrier name here)", while showing F/A-18 Hornets being launched. Now, I realize that many military airplanes look alike to these people, but the F-117 is very distinctive, and also being an Air Force platform isn't capable of carrier operations. Hell, didn't these people do any homework? I probably saw at least one, and usually more, obvious mistakes in the coverage every day. There were a very few reporters who knew what they were talking about, but the rest were mostly just lost.

I'll cut a lot of slack for journalists without any military expertise reporting live (though for what they are paid, you'd think they'd be able to learn a bit about what they are covering).
What gets my goat, though, is the errors that make in into print in major newspapers, such as the "paper of record", the New York Times. These are papers with editors who pick apart everything that gets published. What those editors miss is a useful indicator of what thosee editors know, and what they themselves have, or have not, read. . . .

Oh for... I don't know the difference between a line and a sheet (did run across it once, and like Holmes and the info that the Earth goes around the Sun, did my best to forget it), to me they're both "that rope over there", so what? Bullet vs cartridge - also round, ammo, etc. If I need some and the person I'm talking to understands me...

Come to that, you're all wrong anyway, a mortar is that thing used with a pestle, has been since before gunpowder. The two were sometimes used to corn (and how the heck the name for Egyptian wheat came to mean so many different things - argh) gunpowder, a dangerous process with the occasional result of the pestle (and body parts) flying through out of the mortar. So probably a mortar round (there's that other word again) should be called a pestle.

Yes, it is depressing. Reporters should at least take some time to scan through some web sites or reference books and familiarize themselves with the millitary hardware they're likely to encounter. Or just ask someone who knows. It's laziness and bad editing. And a thinly veiled contempt for all matters related to the millitary doesn't help either.

The reporters are stupid.At least most of them. one reporter said on the news"look at that CAT (Catipilar)go! When she was pointing to a tank.

The link labeled "modern mortar" is bad. It sent me to a site that tried to download something and asked me to change my homepage.

Link fixed -- or rather, updated.