A Moving Target

By Ian Tuttle

Tuesday, September 2014

Q: Barry has a military. With its 1.4 million servicemen and women, thousands of aircraft, naval vessels, and land vehicles, 5,000 warheads, and several billion rounds of ammunition, this military contains enough energy to both degrade and destroy Barry’s enemies, who are primarily “extremists” who are — let me be perfectly clear — not Islamic. This energy is available for immediate release in a blistering campaign of shock-and-by-god-awe when Barry demurs. In what state is this energy? Circle the correct answer.

A: Kinetic

B: Potential

Being “probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” no doubt Barack Obama would breeze through the above question, curing Ebola en route to the answer. But lesser mortals, such as this humble liberal-arts-school author, are likely to find themselves stumped.

“War” being, until very recently, the “wrong terminology” for the exercise of American military force against enemies dedicated to America’s annihilation, the present administration found a fitting euphemism in “kinetic military action.” “Protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone” required “kinetic military action,” as White House aide Ben Rhodes explained in March 2011.

The term has re-emerged in the debate about the nature of the conflict with the Islamic State. Over the weekend, a State Department official traveling with John Kerry told reporters that “there have been offers to CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command] from Arab countries willing to take more kinetic actions.”

“Kinetic action” is a paradigmatic 21st-century phrase — sophisticated, important-sounding, meaningless. Try taking “action” without kinesis — that is, without movement. The Greek κινεῖν, whence our “kinetic,” simply means “to move,” whether it’s to move from one place to another, or to be moved by a piece of art.

“Kinetic” is an apt description of every major battle there has ever been, since they’ve all involved, well, moving. Xerxes moved 2.5 million fighting men across the Hellespont into Greece, reports Herodotus, and Alexander did the same 150 years later, though going in the opposite direction, and with a decidedly smaller force. Caesar’s army crossed the Rubicon, Napoleon’s forces marched on Moscow, Russian forces swept toward Berlin. “Kinetic actions,” all of them.

As a more refined term of military art, “kinetic” characterizes nearly all of the weaponry that preceded explosives. The stones in David’s slingshot, the boulders in Frankish trebuchets, cannonballs, even bullets — all are “kinetic” weaponry. Their deadliness depends strictly on the energy with which they strike.

There are more recent, concentrated attempts to mitigate the need for a big boom. In 1981 the U.S. Air Force employed aerospace contractor Vought to develop an anti-tank missile that would use its speed, not explosive warheads, to destroy targets. Vought’s Hypervelocity Missile gave way to the MGM-166 in the late 1980s: a Line-of-Sight Anti-Tank/Kinetic Energy Missile, often fired from atop a Humvee. An Army Future Combat Series program to develop a smaller, hypersonic version — a Compact Kinetic Energy Missile — was canceled in 2004.

But the science-fiction possibilities survive. In 2006, SFGate wrote about a possible weapon system that could sling metal rods, using the earth’s orbit, at underground bunkers — for instance, deep-buried nuclear-weapons facilities. Insiders called them “rods from God” — “think of a bundle of insulated metal telephone poles, dropped from an exquisitely calculated orbital location and reaching a speed of Mach 10 (over 7,000 mph) by the time they hit Earth.”

Deploying these weapons could justifiably be called “kinetic actions.” But, of course, that is not what the Obama administration has in mind.

Ironically, the current administration has commandeered a term that gained traction among members of George W. Bush’s Cabinet following the September 11 attacks. From Bob Woodward’s 2002 book Bush at War:

    For many days the war cabinet had been dancing around the basic question: how long could they wait after September 11 before the U.S. started going “kinetic,” as they often termed it, against al Qaeda in a visible way? The public was patient, at least it seemed patient, but everyone wanted action. A full military action — air and boots — would be the essential demonstration of seriousness — to bin Laden, America, and the world.

As Timothy Noah observed at Slate at the time, “kinetic” here was supposed to mean “active, as opposed to latent,” where “less violent and more high-tech means of warfare, such as messing electronically with the enemy’s communications equipment or wiping out its bank accounts” would be “non-kinetic.”

Noah categorized “kinetic warfare” as a “retronym,” a coinage of former George McGovern campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz, used “to delineate previously unnecessary distinctions” — for instance, “analog watch” or “two-parent family.” Given a tactical menu that includes “cyberwarfare” and “psychological warfare,” such a retronym would seem to make sense.

But to modify “warfare” according to stratagem only begs the question that the Obama administration has repeatedly struggled to answer: Are we at war, or not? Presumably, citizens would feel less than confident about the long-term vision of a government that claims to be “at war” when it comes to email sabotage, but not “at war” when it comes to “boots on the ground.” Undoubtedly Langley’s computer geeks are hard at work corrupting data on mainframes in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere, but we are not “at non-kinetic war” with those countries — because we would not be willing to go to “kinetic” war. If you are unwilling to engage the enemy in the trenches, you are not at war.

The administration conceded on Friday that the United States and the Islamic State are at war — but this “kinetic military action” is likely to look very “non-kinetic.” After all, the president has already precluded significant military action. This returns us to our original quiz question: What kind of energy does the American military have at the present time? It seems to be neither kinetic nor potential.

Then again, after violating the laws of the land and of logic, why should the laws of nature be any different?