Word of the Week: What makes a military attack ‘kinetic’?

(CNN) — When Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah first learned over the weekend that US forces had struck Venezuela and abducted its leader, he wanted answers. Without the approval of Congress, he wondered, what justified this attack inside another country?

Two hours later, he got an answer from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Just got off the phone with @SecRubio,” Lee wrote on X. “He informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.”

That “kinetic action,” Lee concluded, “likely falls within the president’s inherent authority … to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.”

“Kinetic” — from the Greek kinētikos, meaning putting in motion — has become a recurring word for government officials talking about US aggression against Venezuela. As the Trump administration has blown up boats from Venezuela and Colombia over the past several months, ostensibly to protect Americans from the scourge of drugs, it has repeatedly called its actions “kinetic strikes.”

You probably know the word “kinetic” from physics lessons about kinetic energy, meaning the energy that an object has when it’s moving, as opposed to the unreleased potential energy it has sitting still. When “kinetic” first entered the military lexicon, it was used in this context, to describe munitions that did damage through sheer speed and mass, rather than with explosive force.

As linguistics researcher Neil Whitman noted in 2011, the 1978 “Code Name Handbook: Aerospace, Defense, Technology” lists the acronym SKEW, meaning shoulder-fired kinetic energy weapon. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative also used the term “kinetic energy weapons,” which it defined as nonexplosive projectiles moving at high speeds to inflict damage.

Over the years, the military use of “kinetic” took on a broader meaning. Per CNN senior military analyst James Stavridis, kinetic now indicates physical impact, like “a bullet, a bomb, a knife,” as opposed to “non-kinetic,” which denotes “cyber, intelligence, things that don’t have physical impact in an operation, but can still be very very important.”

Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and co-author of the Substack newsletter Comment is Freed, characterizes this usage as a product of the digital age. As military capabilities expanded to include cyber warfare and other, less overt forms of conflict, military officials began using “kinetic” to delineate the more obvious violence typically associated with war.

If “kinetic” became military lingo out of a desire for greater precision, it soon enough acquired vague and metaphorical uses.

During the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush’s defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld frequently used “kinetic” to denote taking action — unleashing the potential violence of the US military in actual combat. As Bob Woodward wrote in his 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.”

In 2010, the American Dialect Society voted “kinetic event,” which it described as the Pentagon’s term for violent attacks on troops in Afghanistan, as the most euphemistic words of the year. That didn’t stop it from being used to obfuscate. When President Barack Obama launched air strikes in Libya in 2011, then-White House aide Ben Rhodes used “kinetic” to assert that these actions were something other than war.

“I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone,” he said at the time. “So it’s not a war; it’s a kinetic military action that is time-limited and contribution-limited on the front end.”

In Freedman’s view, “kinetic” is “a completely superfluous word”: “It’s just used now as a way of saying, ‘Well, this time it’s serious, because stuff is getting destroyed, people are getting killed.’”

A closer examination of the recent boat attacks, which the Trump administration has called “kinetic strikes,” does raise the question: What, exactly, would constitute a non-kinetic strike? Would “strike” alone not suffice?

“Kinetic” can be a supremely unsatisfying word, no matter one’s outlook on military intervention. Timothy Noah, in a 2002 column for Slate, put it like this: “To those who deplore or resist going to war, ‘kinetic’ is unconscionably euphemistic, with antiseptic connotations derived from high-school physics and aesthetic ones traceable to the word’s frequent use by connoisseurs of modern dance,” he wrote. “To those who celebrate war (or at least find it grimly necessary), ‘kinetic’ fails to evoke the manly virtues of strength, fierceness, and bravery.”

On that last point, it seems the tides have turned. As Trump administration officials have used “kinetic” in press conferences and media releases in recent months, some onlookers see it as a buzzword for aggression.

“There’s sort of a macho element,” Freedman said. “Kinetic sounds like you’re being really tough.”

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