In the summer of 1951, representatives of the NATO alliance, founded just two years earlier, were fighting over how to turn the idea of “containment” into an operational plan for protecting Western Europe from the threat of Soviet invasion. What resources were needed to support Allied armies? What would they cost? Who would pay?
Amid these negotiations, American journalists began noticing an obscure new term circulating among advisers to Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s supreme commander. From his offices outside Paris at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), Eisenhower and his staff discussed plans for infrastructure, a word they had lifted from their French counterparts that one journalist explained meant “supporting air bases, lines of communication, supply depots and other facilities an army needs to live and fight.
Officials around Eisenhower loved the term. It concisely described a set of investments whose only common element was being necessary to support modern warfare. “New jargon though the French word ‘infrastructure’ may be,” observed one reporter, “SHAPE technicians declare the general public might as well get used to it because they (the military) find the term fits like a glove what else it would take reams to say.”
It might have taken reams to say otherwise because even then, precisely what Eisenhower’s NATO staff meant to include and exclude within infrastructure remained fuzzy. “The term ‘infrastructure’ is applied to all ‘housekeeping’ installations and includes all kinds of real estate, buildings and equipment not used in actual combat, but excludes all matériel such as planes, tanks and guns,” noted The New York Times in 1952. But it could include much more. The Washington Post informed its readers that infrastructure “means, as we understand it, the military installations (together with men, equipment and finances) built in one country for the benefit of the whole NATO membership.” Part of the problem was, as one author noted after interviewing a French official in 1951, “this word has no English equivalent.” The precise boundaries remained vague.
Not everyone was as enthusiastic about infrastructure—the word—as the U.S. military was. The longtime journalist Theodore White called it “one of those long dull words invented to conceal political explosives.” Others chose world-weary cynicism. “Infrastructure is a North Atlantic treaty organization word which means that Uncle Sam will pay the entire bill,” grumbled one stateside columnist.
Others expressed bewilderment. “One thing I can’t explain to you is how these facilities came to be called by the name ‘infrastructure,’” confessed Secretary of State Dean Acheson in an article noting that he found the term “baffling.” Acheson had worked on economic diplomacy at the highest levels for the previous 11 years and was apparently unfamiliar with the term. Another writer, who thought the word sounded like “some sort of heating-lamp contraption designed to make use of infra-red rays” blamed the Pentagon’s penchant for jargon. “Where else could this horrible new term ‘infrastructure’ have originated but with the people steeped too long in the gobbledygook of Washington?”