Are you familiar with kinetic warfare? If so, can you tell me where the term sprang from?
In military circles, talk of ‘kinetic’ and ‘non-kinetic’ approaches to warfare is rampant. It’s like Japanese knotweed. I recently read an assessment of the UK government’s ‘after-kinetic plan’ for Iraq – surely a ‘kinetic’ too far.
I’m interested partly because all this talk of kinetic clearly presupposes a contrasting approach to the use of force. And so, I’ve just spent an hour or two trying to track down its origins; but I appeal to the much greater knowledge of KoW readers. If you know when kinetic approaches started to feature in the literature or around the water cooler, please do let me know.
My first thought was to turn to the US AirLand battle operational doctrine of the 1980s. No mentioned of kinetic there, but then, perhaps that’s not so surprising in a document so overwhelmingly focused on conventional manoeuvre warfare. Still no mention in the 1993 version, and still none in the 2001 version either [pdfs].
Next, I turned to the Joint Chiefs’ Joint Vision 2020 [pdf], which alerts readers to a ’system of systems’ that
will provide the commander the broadest possible range of capabilities in responding to any situation, including both kinetic and nonkinetic weapons capable of creating the desired lethal or nonlethal effects.
Joint Vision 2020 dates from May 2000. Clearly, though kinetic talk hadn’t yet made it into Operations doctrine, it was doing the rounds. Note that here the talk is about weapons, rather than broader approaches to conflict.
Finally, for this afternoon, I turned to JFCOM’s White Paper on Rapid Decisive Operations [doc], from August 2001. Again, there’s mention of kinetic:
“Strategic Objective to Task Linkage: [...] The means may be kinetic or non-kinetic means capable of creating desired lethal and nonlethal effects, information operations, or joint maneuver.”
The language is broader here: non-kinetic means, not just weapons, may be applied to create ‘effects’. There’s even more mention of kinetic and non-kinetic tools, weapons, means and options in an earlier version, from October 1999. But there’s no mention of kinetic in Ullman and Wade’s famous 1996 conceptual paper, ‘Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance’. [pdf]
One thing that’s clear from an afternoon spent reading doctrine and conceptual papers is that the English language often comes off second best in any encounter with military drafters. The resultant headache made me think more broadly about the purpose of language in military writing.
‘Kinetic’, by my reckoning, serves three purposes: Most obviously, it clears space for thinking about the non-violent uses of military force. Second, it is a classic military euphemism to avoid plainer, more distasteful English words, like violent, or lethal force. And third, and most pernicious, like many military terms of art, it separates out a group of those in the know from those not.
A few months ago, General Mattis did a great service to US doctrine by pointing out that the terminology of Effects Based Operations left much to be desired:
We must return clarity to our planning processes and operational concepts, […] The use of effects “effects” has confused what previously was a well-designed and straightforward process for determining “ends.”
I don’t feel quite so strongly about “kinetic”, but it is irritating when military writers take up an English word and wring the life out of it.
Perhaps they should issue incoming doctrine writers with George Orwell’s great essay on politics and the English language, in which he gives this sensible advice:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Quite. Meanwhile – if you’ve any advance on the origins of kinetic - let me know.
Tags: kinetic
Wednesday, 27, May, 2009 at 2:42 pm |
pretty sure its sometime after things start going very badly in Iraq. I anecdotally didn’t start hearing it until 2004ish. but that’s pretty impressionistic.
you are right though, it is a euphemism for ‘violence’ and it is an elitist way of something something simple in exclusionary language.
Wednesday, 27, May, 2009 at 2:48 pm |
Thanks Patrick. My earliest date is October 1999: that’s the one to beat…
Wednesday, 27, May, 2009 at 3:59 pm |
There are numerous uses of “kinetic” to describe weaponry in the aviation and space literature of the early 1990s, where it was typically used in discussions about the various types of weapons that might be employed for missile defense.
The earliest reference I could find to “kinetic” in an international security/strategy context was Harvey McGeorge’s article in the Summer 1983 issue of World Affairs on “The Kinetics of Terrorism.”
Wednesday, 27, May, 2009 at 5:17 pm |
I am also familiar with “kinetic” being originally used in missile defense discussions. I found it in Carter and Schwartz, “Ballistic Missile Defense” which is an edited volume about the topic. I’m sure they have some citations from even earlier.
Thursday, 28, May, 2009 at 12:23 am |
Because I first heard the term as a reference to types of anti-armor munitions, I searched the patent literature in the US.
The first reference I found for it was in a Canadian application for a US patent, “Centering adaptor for an anti-armour kinetic energy penetrator” filed in late 1984.
My thesis is that the adjective “kinetic” (long used by scientists) entered the military lexicon as it increasingly was used to differentiate between various types of penetrator warheads.
This gives me the ironic privilege of now blaming The Minister of National Defence of Her Majesty’s Canadian Government for befouling the English language with “kinetic” as a description of shooting, moving and communicating.
Thursday, 28, May, 2009 at 6:37 am |
A possible source for the usage-in-question would be http://www.slate.com/id/2074367/ from 2002. It argues that the Bob Woodward book “Bush at War” introduced it as a retronym. In other words, perhaps it was birthed at the intersection of military and political usage and happened to catch on in the larger military community.
Prior to this, the kinetic term seems to have been primarily an engineering term-of-art rather than a tactical one. I seem to recall several earlier instances crossover where it developed narrow tactical meanings (in aviation, I believe, although there may have been others), but they seem to be unrelated developments that didn’t spread beyond their originating user-cultures.
Thursday, 28, May, 2009 at 7:06 am |
Gents – many thanks to you all. Early 80s and the star wars literature it is – I’ll take a look. As SNLII says, it looks like the usage has morphed a bit since then…
Thursday, 28, May, 2009 at 12:22 pm |
“Kinetic” has been used for a long time as a technical, not tactical or operational, term.
The counterpart was “chemical”. More accurately: “kinetic energy” and “chemical energy”.
The kinetic energy describes ammunition meant to impact and penetrate the target while chemical energy was supposed to penetrate by shaped charge effect (including EFP) or blast.
The distinction makes sense because kinetic energy projectiles lose speed, therefore kinetic energy and therefore penetration capability over longer distance. Chemical energy ammunition’s penetration capability/effect is not seriously influenced by range.
The current use of kinetic/non-kinetic is buzzword nonsense. They should say violent/non-violent because that’s what they mean.
http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/02/kinetic.html
Thursday, 28, May, 2009 at 7:34 pm |
Perhaps what’s gone unmentioned is how odd this sort of dispersion would be. Within the culture of the US Army, usually phrases move from the bottom (slang) to the top.
A good example would be “blivet.” While it has currency in the studies of art and technology as a noun used to describe an optical illusion, the word actually has been used far more often within the U.S. military.
During WWII, a “blivet” indicated anything that was particularly ugly or offensive. As enlisted cavalry wags of the day put it, a blivet was akin to “ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag.”
Duiring the Cold War service eventually gussied up what’s frankly an (intentionally) offensive notion into jargon for real systems of weapons, often used to describe experimental warheads or a jet’s external baggage totes.
The Army, however, actually made it the actual name of a common logistical apparatus. In Vietnam, blivets were the mammoth rubber encasements holding fuel. We still call them that, and you can spot blivets on FOBs or LSAs, usually encircled by sandbags and barbed wire, lest someone detonate them and a good portion of the base.
This is usually the way things work: It starts out as slang, often meant as shorthand for the sexual or scatalogical, and eventually becomes common usage to the point that reflexively the term is adopted into something as prosaic as a fuel bladder.
Thursday, 28, May, 2009 at 7:35 pm |
Ugggh.
“Duiring the Cold War service ”
During the Cold War, each service …
Friday, 29, May, 2009 at 8:42 am |
SNLII – it’s a good thought. This one started in the lab, then adopted by the RMA crowd, and now on to COIN afficionados. How best to stop the rot?
Sven – great post – thanks for that.
Friday, 29, May, 2009 at 12:43 pm |
To add to the debate, “kinetic vs. non-kinetic” is being overtaken by “lethal vs. non-lethal”. Within the military (U.S. at least), this terminology debate is being conducted within the contect of “Information Operations”–what are they, exactly, and how do we factor them into our operating concepts, planning considerations, etc.
At the operational to tactical levels, this whole area has fallen into the “Fires” area, traditionally the realm of artillery and strike aviation. that has caused the concept of non-kinetic or non-lethal to be discussed as “fires” and placed in the context of a targeting cycle (we develop target folders for non-kinetic fires). I’m not sure if this is an appropriate point of departure to consider these capabilities and operations.
Friday, 29, May, 2009 at 12:52 pm |
“I’m not sure if this is an appropriate point of departure to consider these capabilities and operations.”
Wow, that’s an understatement.
That approach sounds outright idiotic.
By the way; I only encountered “non-lethal” in a weapons (R&D, procurement) context so far.
Sunday, 31, May, 2009 at 12:13 am |
It’s “combat”. I am sick of reading descriptions of ground force activities as “kinetic operations”. Call it what it is…combat.
Monday, 1, June, 2009 at 11:37 am |
[...] Firstly, though, can you help these history bloggers? Can you add any 19th century female utilitarians to this list? Do you know any examples of medieval stained glass windows in film? What Great War gesture is that? When did violence in war become ‘kinetic’? [...]