Military Language and the Curse of Expertise

Dr. Elena Wicker recently completed her Ph.D. in International Relations at Georgetown University. Her dissertation, The Words That Matter: Terminology and Performance in the U.S. Army, explores the history of U.S. military lexicography and the strategic creation and use of jargon in strategy, doctrine, and concepts. Her interdisciplinary and multi-method research combines archival research, interviews, and quantitative methods including machine learning and natural language processing.

Dr. Wicker was a 2021-2022 predoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and was selected as a 2022 Presidential Management Fellowship finalist. She has been an Adjunct Researcher with the RAND Corporation since 2019, and has contributed to projects relating to intelligence, security cooperation, homeland security, and defense policy. Prior to her graduate studies, she served as an Intelligence Security Cooperation Officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency. She has completed internships in arms control treaty verification at the Department of State and worked for refugee aid projects in Jordan and the West Bank while studying advanced Arabic as a Boren Scholar. She holds an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University and a B.A. (magna cum laude) in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University.

*Originally recorded August 1, 2022.