Of the military theories developed in the last quarter century, none have stirred the heated feelings in the defense community quite like Fourth Generation Warfare has done. In part, this is due to the unsparingly harsh criticism that leading 4GW advocates have directed at both the mainstream Pentagon establishment and the rival school of Network-centric Warfare; mostly though, it is because 4GW questions the validity of the current defense establishment itself. If 4GW theory is correct, then much of the American defense budget amounts to so much waste. As 4GW theorists would have it, money ill-spent for exquisitely high tech weaponry that will not work as promised, purchased for the kinds of wars that are never again going to be fought. The 4GW school is riding high right now; not simply because the GWOT lends fertile field for study and examples but because the outcome of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War was far more accurately predicted by 4GW theorists than by the conventional military experts. This was despite the fact that Hezbollah is not quite a “true” 4GW military force, but a state sponsored hybrid whose vulnerabilities the IDF failed to exploit.
William Lind, a paleoconservative, Washington think tanker, is generally credited with being the “Father of Fourth Generation Warfare” and is the school’s most authoritative voice, having been one of the primary authors of the seminal article “
The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation“, published in 1989. Lind was an associate and disciple of Colonel John Boyd and Boyd’s strategic theory is one of the major inspirations for 4GW theory. The second major influence are the ideas of the eminent Dutch-Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld. A third influence, and here I am being entirely speculative, may be the intellectual studies on tactics and strategy of the German Reichswehr, under the leadership of General Hans von Seeckt, during the 1920’s...
Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part I.)
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