"Chicken shit", or more commonly "chickenshit", is a slang term, usually regarded as vulgar.
The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines chickenshit (one word) as a vulgar adjective with two possible meanings: "petty, insignificant" or "lacking courage, manliness, or effectiveness".
In October 2014, an unnamed senior official in the Obama administration was reported to have called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "chickenshit", adding that he "has got no guts".
[3] Secretary of State John Kerry apologized to the prime minister,[4] while Israeli media scrambled to understand or translate the idiom.
[6] According to Paul Fussell in his book Wartime, chickenshit in this sense has military roots: "Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of the ordinances ... Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse—or bull—or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.