Linguistic Sources of Coalition Miscommunication

Current major military deployments almost always involve collaboration between multinational teams. Joint operations often face operationally and environmentally complex and dynamic scenarios. Effective and efficient communication is a key enabler to success; however, the diverse backgrounds of multinational teams have presented serious challenges in coalition communication. This on-going exploratory study investigates miscommunications between US and UK military personnel (and civilians working with them). It focuses on understanding miscommunication due to differences in language forms and language use, including the context of use. Based on the data collected from a set of semi-structured interviews of military personnel, this study identified a number of categories and patterns of miscommunication. The preliminary results have presented a number of implications for improving communication between UK and US teams, which can serve as insights for improving multinational team communication in general.