brushfire
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]brushfire (plural brushfires)
- A large fire in a scrubland or prairie, as opposed to a forest fire, which occurs in forests.
- (politics, figurative, attributive) A war that arises suddenly and is limited in scope or area.
- 1958, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Ways and Means. Subcommittee on Foreign Trade Policy, Foreign Trade Policy: Hearings, Eighty-fifth Congress, page 651:
- It may be a brushfire operation or an operation on the scale of the Korean war; it will certainly not involve the home territories of the United States and Soviet Russia as theaters of hostilities.
- 1959, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations, Financial statements of field commanders, page 251:
- I grant you it may not be in the actual application of mechanical devices, but if you have the volume to have supremacy in a major war it is obvious you would have the volume to take care of a brushfire war.
- 1963, Philip Van Slyck, Peace: the Control of National Power, page 14:
- If a brushfire conflict does threaten superpower interests, or the general peace, a superpower may intervene in an unusual way.