Wow. The "biggest air assault" in Iraq since the shockandawe days of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was how the U.S. described a counter-insurgency offensive northeast of Samarra. However, this BBC story explains how that claim is a whole lotta semantic nonsense.

An excerpt:

Operation Swarmer clearly bore no comparison in scale to the initial attack which brought down Saddam Hussein's regime, or to the massive assault on the insurgent stronghold in the city of Falluja in November 2004.

Nor did it appear to match a series of counter-insurgency operations involving air strikes and ground forces in remote areas near the Syrian border in western Iraq last year.

In one four-day campaign last May, the US military said it had killed 125 insurgents for the loss of nine of its own men killed and 40 injured.

So how and why did this latest apparently routine combing operation, yielding a few arms caches and netting some low-grade suspects, manage to win stop-press coverage around the world?

The use of the phrase "the largest air assault operation" was clearly crucial, raising visions of a massive bombing campaign.

In fact, all the phrase meant is that more helicopters were deployed to airlift the troops into the area than in previous such operations.

The 50 "aircraft" that had been deployed were not combat jets blasting insurgent targets, but helicopters ferrying in the forces. There was no rocketing or bombing from the sky.

In US military parlance, "air assault" means transporting troops into a combat zone by air. It could include, but does not necessarily imply, air strikes.

Question of semantics?

A US military spokesman gave the BBC the following official definition of the term:

The US military says some 1,500 US and Iraqi troops are involved

"According to US joint (multiservice) doctrine, an air assault is one in which assault forces, using the mobility of rotary wing assets and total integration of available firepower, manoeuvre under the control of a ground or air manoeuvre commander to engage enemy forces or seize key terrain."

In this instance, key terrain may have been seized, but no enemy forces were apparently engaged.

But the massive press coverage was not just the result of a semantic misunderstanding.

Unusually, high-quality photographs and video footage of the initial deployment were made available to the press towards the end of Day One of what was billed as a campaign that would last several days.

Some international media were given unusually swift military embeds to the area.