Who said kinetic military action

Africa Command, said of the coalition forces, "We possess certainly a very significant kinetic capability. At times, it also appears to mean just taking action. Now, White House officials are referring to the war in Libya not as a war but as a "kinetic military action. Restoring America. White House: Libya fight is not war, it's 'kinetic military action' by Byron York. In a article in Slate , Timothy Noah noted a passage from Bob Woodward's 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.

Beltway Confidential. Byron York. More Washington Examiner. Thursday November 11, Some Washington Republicans gave Democratic Gov. In other words, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favour of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they , the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name.

When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not. This cannot be classified as anything but strange thinking and it depends, in turn, on a strange fact: that, in our day, it is indeed possible for some countries or maybe only our own , for the first time in history, to wage war without receiving a scratch in return. This was nearly accomplished in the bombing of Serbia in , in which only one American plane was shot down and the pilot rescued. The epitome of this new warfare is the predator drone , which has become an emblem of the Obama administration.

War waged in this way is without casualties for the wager because none of its soldiers are near the scene of battle — if that is even the right word for what is going on. Some strange conclusions follow from this strange thinking and these strange facts. In the old scheme of things, an attack on a country was an act of war, no matter who launched it or what happened next.

Now, the Obama administration claims that if the adversary cannot fight back, there is no war. If war and coercive diplomacy only involved kinetic military action, this would be one of our most bellicose of presidents. Look at the kinetic military action he has authorized:. Compared with his last two Democratic predecessors, Clinton and Carter, and measured only in kinetic military terms, this is dramatically more hawkish behavior.

Napoleon used to say that the moral is to the physical as three is to one. So when the administration talks about kinetic military action, realize that this may simply be indicating that that is the only part of the strategy that has a good chance of succeeding.

We should all hope that the impressive kinetic military action the president has authorized is sufficient to overcome the deficiencies in the non-kinetic aspects of the strategy. Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Program in American Grand Strategy.

Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox! Recently, I've been blogging over at the Washington Examiner 's lively "Beltway Confidential" site, mostly on the subject of congressional war powers and President Obama's Libyan adventure.

Today's post, "Obama Makes 'Kinetic Military Action' on the English Language" has a little fun with the administration's wordgames and the legal rationales behind them. Other posts and a column on the subject are here , here , and here. Today also brings a pair of columns--in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post , respectively--from conservative luminaries defending the notion that Obama has the constitutional power to bomb Libya without congressional authorization.

Yoo, the legal architect of George W. Their praiseworthy opposition to the growth of federal powers at home misleads them to resist Washington's indispensable role abroad. They mistakenly read the 18th-century constitutional text through a modern lens—for example, understanding "declare war" to mean "start war.

It had little to do with launching hostilities. In the century before the Constitution, for example, Great Britain fought numerous major conflicts but declared war only once beforehand. Similarly, in the Post , David B. Rivkin, Jr. Casey write :. As commander in chief, the president has the authority to determine when and how U.