Definition of "clusterfuck"

[Colonel Meyers:] That's for sure. What's your assessment of this exercise? [Highway:] It's a cluster fuck.

1986, Clint Eastwood, Heartbreak Ridge, IMDB tt0091187

"Mongolian Cluster Fuck" is the technical term journalists use for a preplanned, wholly scripted, news-free event.

1989: P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell p. 216

They had a name for something like this in the army—a cluster fuck. Yes. Good name... He was sitting here in the middle of a great big cluster fuck

1990, Stephen King, Dark Half‎, page 151

A simple sweep-and-clear turned into a total clusterfuck: T-Bird, trying to explain to Eric how the situation escalated on Devil's Night […]

1994, James O'Barr, Alex Proyas, The Crow

Please note also my request that henceforth I wish to be reminded of the possibility of a clusterfuck in any contingency plan or operations proposal […]

1995, John Barnes, Mother of Storms

My cousin was in the Army over here in '68. He says don't trust anybody to know what they're doing, calls it a cluster-fuck. Fucked-up-beyond-all-repair, FUBAR he says.

2004, Ray Kopp, Thunder in the Night: A Sailor's Perspective on Vietnam, page 87

[…] and you will still only begin to get a sense of the constitutionally mandated clusterfuck that is the modern presidency.

2004, Jon Stewart, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide To Democracy Inaction

It was a clusterfuck, a deadly clusterfuck. When the doughs finally got off the ground in some numbers and charged into the woods, the Krauts broke contact […]

2005, Charles W. Sasser, Patton's Panthers: The African-American 761st Tank Battalion in World War II

[CIA-Superior:] Okay. Okay. If he wakes up we'll worry about it then. Jesus, what a clusterfuck.

2008, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Burn After Reading, IMDB tt0887883