Beltway Gab Gives Us a New ‘Surge’

In his address to the nation last Sunday on the threats posed by terrorism, President Barack Obama said, “Since the attacks in Paris, we’ve surged intelligence-sharing with our European allies.”

Mr. Obama’s use of “surge” might sound peculiar to those outside the Beltway: He treated the word as a transitive verb. Typically “surge” is intransitive, requiring no object, as in, “The cost of health care has surged.” In that context it means “to increase suddenly” or “to swell with great force,” reflecting the word’s historical connection to billowing ocean waves.

If you look in major English dictionaries, you’ll find scant guidance in understanding how the president used the verb. Merriam-Webster and American Heritage, for instance, only provide a nautical sense for transitive “surge,” meaning “to let go or slacken suddenly,” as a rope on a ship.

In the 1990s a very different type of “surging” came into military parlance, with personnel being “surged,” or deployed quickly, to a particular region. A 1993 article in Defense Daily, for instance, reported on a Navy contract to procure ships that could “surge troops and equipment to crisis areas.”

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This use of “surge” stayed mostly in Pentagon circles for a decade or so but was thrust into the limelight in late 2006, when George W. Bush’s administration made plans for a “troop surge” in Iraq the following year. As former CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote in a Nov. 10, 2006, commentary in The Wall Street Journal, “We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight.”

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