Pentagon denies 'mission creep' in Iraq as new U.S. troop presence reaches 650

[Igel]

9. Simple enough to test.

Look at what the mission was.

Look at what the mission is.

Is there a change?

If the mission is "protect the embassy and its immediate environs for the safety of diplomats and workers", okay. That's the mission. If "environs" starts off meaning "10 blocks in any direction from embassy walls" and a month later means "up to 100 miles from embassy walls" it's mission creep because the terms of the mission have changed.

But the same mission can be done with a pop-gun, a few hundred Marines, with Predator drones, or with a tank division. The problem is the temptation to use the tank division in ways that a couple hundred Marines could never be used. That's standard mission creep--repurposing materiel and troops. If the drones that are missile-capable are kept near the embassy and not moved out to hit targets on a more distant battlefield, no mission creep.

In this case there were two missions. One was embassy protection. The other was advising, which I'll grant can easily include intelligence analysis and wandering around among the troops and near the battlefield for the purpose of collecting information. If drones are used to help collect data and not target the enemy, that's also not mission creep.

The main difficulty is not letting the term "mission creep" undergo extensive "definition creep" so that we condemn it as evil when it has one meaning, get used to condemning "mission creep," and reflexively continue to condemn mission creep when it's taken on an entirely different meaning. It's an informal fallacy to shift definitions mid-argument and assume that somehow the argument still is valid.