NATO and the U.S. military use the same phonetic alphabet, and it is widely accepted and used in international radio communications on the sea, air, or land.

The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (IRSA) is its proper name, and it was created by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to help decipher similar sounding letters and numbers between different countries and organizations.

Phonetic Alphabet in the Military

The phonetic alphabet is a list of words used to identify letters in a message transmitted by radio, telephone, and encrypted messages. The phonetic alphabet can also be signaled with flags, lights, and Morse Code.

When on the radio, spoken words from an approved list are substituted for letters. For example, the word "Army" would be "Alfa Romeo Mike Yankee" when spelled in the phonetic alphabet. This practice helps to prevent confusion between similar sounding letters, such as "m" and "n," and to clarify signals communications that may be garbled during transmission.

In military missions, the use of the phonetic alphabet has been used to communicate with the chain of command as to what phase of the mission has been successfully performed. For instance, if a SEAL Team has arrived on the beach and were undetected to continue the mission, they may have designated that as the first "waypoint" and use the code word "Alpha." It will tell the upper-level chain of command where they are and if they are on schedule.

An early version of the phonetic alphabet appears in the 1913 edition of The Navy Bluejackets’ Manual. Found in the Signals section, it was paired with the Alphabetical Code Flags defined in the International Code. Both the meanings of the flags (the letter which they represent) and their names (which make up the phonetic alphabet) were selected by international agreement. Later editions included the Morse code signal as well.

Military Phonetic Alphabet Over Time