Hybrid Warfare (merged thread)

[Tukhachevskii]

The Third Generation of manoeuvre, what Lind and Hammes erroneously label Blitzkrieg, can actually be located farther back in history with the Assyrians (c. 900 B.C.) who combined horses with chariots and armed the riders with spears and bows. This enabled ‘the first true long range army, able to campaign as far as 300 miles from base and to move at speeds of advance that would not be exceeded until the coming of the internal combustion engine’. Psychologically chariot warfare led to the creation of a disciplined warrior group adept at ‘flock management’ wherein they would approach ‘their enemy in loose crescent formation’ by which they could herd their foot bound opponents and begin attacking them from afar with bows only to dispatch them at close quarter having divided and segmented them (an example of ancient swarming). The Assyrian empire fell largely due to the inroads of the Scythians who had learned to ride the horse at an earlier date. Yet, if anything qualifies as a generation or paradigm shift in (manoeuvre) warfare it is the domestication of the horse by the steppe based Sredni Stog culture group around 4,100 B.C in an area presently in Southern Ukraine which not only ‘expanded the size of potential exploitative territories by a factor of five, nullifying whatever territorial boundaries existed previously’ but also, ‘provided the ability to strike across great distances at hostile neighbours and to retreat (typically the most dangerous part of a pedestrian raid) faster than any pedestrian party could pursue’. In later North Africa where elephants were more widely available they became the equivalent of modern tanks and were used to great effect by Hannibal. He had them partially covered in armour, fixed iron spikes to their tusks, manned them with up to four warriors equipped with bows, slings, and javelins and used them for shock action and breaking through dense Roman infantry phalanxes. They were defeated, ironically, not through force of arms but by guile and cunning when at the Battle of Zama (202.B.C.) Scipio Africanus ordered his entire front line ‘to make a tremendous blare with trumpets and horns, which startled the elephants [...] some of them actually turned tail at once, rushing back on their own troops’. Those that were not so rattled were dispatched by experienced and specially trained light infantry, velites, who had faced them before and engaged them with javelins and bows. Afterward, in a scene foreshadowing the First World War, the Carthaginians were forced to surrender their war elephants and refrain from training them in future. In this context First Generation warfare trumped the Third.

Lind and Hammes generational approach to the evolution of warfare assumes that each generation was superseded by the next which is evidently not the case. Manoeuvre, attrition and mass are not generations but methods of war fighting deployed in diverse combinations according to the strategy of the combatants and the conditions in which war is being waged (such as geography, climate, or topography). No attempt was made by either author to differentiate between mass, manoeuvre and attrition at the tactical, operational or strategic levels of war. For instance, in WWI tactical mobility was largely dependent upon muscle power while strategic mobility was largely determined by effective railway systems resulting in ‘a twentieth century delivery-system, but a nineteenth century warhead’. Whereas tactical combat is almost always an affair characterised by attrition. Warfare at sea was always a combination of manoeuvre and attrition based on the firepower of ship borne weaponry- bows, Greek fire or cannon -combined with the massed effects of entire fleets later augmented by aircraft (viz. the battles of Salamis 450B.C.; Lepanto 1571; Trafalgar 1805; Tsushima 1906; Midway 1942, etc.). The question of the autonomy of the fourth generation presents us with similar anomalies and problems, some of definition others of scope and location.

2nd Myth: “Insurgency” is the same as “War”
Thomas Marks has commented that ‘when all manner of internal warfare is lumped under the rubric “terrorism”, crucial distinctions are lost’ and the same could be said for insurgency in Lind and Hammes’ framework. According to Rod Thornton ‘insurgencies and war are, in many ways, mutually exclusive. They require different vernaculars, psychologies and approaches. At heart, insurgencies need to be managed away while wars need to be won’. Terrorism, on the other hand, ‘may have much more in common with strategic bombardment than with small unit tactics’. But, the ‘key element of terrorism is the divorce of armed politics from a purported mass base, those in whose name terrorists claim to be fighting’. And where does the partisan warfare perfected by the Soviets during WWII to create a ‘front-behind-the-front’ fit in? Indeed, Mao’s Communists, who supposedly perfected guerrilla warfare, largely fought their KMT rivals ‘with large-unit conventional military operations between massed armies’. Also, as Walter Laqueur states, modern guerrilla warfare, rather than being coherent phenomena, ‘was a system of warfare chosen instinctively, without the benefit of any preconceived doctrine’. In fact many of the insurgencies currently ongoing began in exactly the same way and evolved, along with their goals and the strategies to achieve them, over time. As Brian Jenkins observed, ‘the three components of armed conflict― conventional war, guerrilla war and terrorism ―will coexist in the future [as they have done in the past]. Governments and sub-national entities will employ them individually, interchangeably, sequentially or simultaneously’. This complexity is evident in Nigeria where the concept of insurgency as an autonomous (4th generation) realm based on ‘the very idea of an impermeable membrane separating or opposing two discrete entities– government and rebels –breaks down immediately’.

The numerous insurgent groups in Nigeria have a complex relationship to the state, to each other and to the international economy (oil) only some of which will be covered here. Many insurgent groups and criminal gangs are linked to the political process often as hired thugs. In the 2003 elections in the state of Bayelsa’s Southern Ijaw local government, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) used local criminal and militant groups to attack each other’s supporters and intimidate voters. Local Ijaw groups used these linkages as temporary ‘alliances of convenience’ to acquire political favours or hard cash. Insurgent-criminal groups such as the Niger Delta Vigilantes (NDF) and the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NPDVF) actually started out life as thugs for hire for local and regional politicians and then went free-lance when that support dried up although they are still occasionally called upon for favours returned in kind.

[Tukhachevskii]

Secessionist insurgencies revolve around ethnic and economic issues concerning Nigerian oil resources which are located in small ethnic territories. The Movement for the Survival of the Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN) is engaged in a secessionist insurgency demanding greater political and economic autonomy or outright independence. As is the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) who represent the Ibo-speaking south eastern regions and have increased their activity after the corrupt elections of April 2007 and have called for a UN supervised plebiscite. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was originally a non-violent protest group demanding economic empowerment who then adopted armed resistance and secessionist goals after a number of violent Nigerian police and military crackdowns.

International oil companies such as Chevron, Total and Shell are also involved in the insurgent matrix. They pay local militias for protection against other groups as well as paying off local opposition groups with ‘cash payments’. Oil companies also undermine the central government buy providing ‘monthly pay and perks, including housing, transport, meals and medical services to police, army and navy personnel deployed to protect their installations’. Shell admits to importing arms and ammunition from a Lagos arms dealer for its affiliates whereas Total officially states that Nigerian officials, such as supernumerary police and commissioners, are its own employees.

In 2005 an umbrella insurgency group appeared claiming to represent the entire Niger Delta called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and has been by far the most lethal and professional of the insurgent groups. MEND demands that 20-50 percent of oil revenues be redistributed back to local communities in the oil producing regions through local community governed foundations rather than the corrupt and un-transparent patronage system used currently. Nonetheless MEND is also linked with local politics involving struggles between the ethnic groups it purports to represent as well as continued attacks on oil pipelines and refineries in order to steal oil for finance purposes (‘oil-bunkering’).

State violence is also endemic with extra-judicial killings in 2003 amounting to 3,100 deaths in the
Ogoni state alone which led MOSOP to take arms. On 19th February 2005 the Nigerian Army destroyed 78 homes and killed countless civilians in what was supposed to be an operation against a local criminal-cult group called Isenasawo after reports of communal fighting between Odioma and Obioku residents. Instead of attacking Isenasawo, who are often used by local and regional actors to secure pipelines, the army attacked innocent civilians.

3rd Myth: Globalisation is destroying the State
By arguing that the state has failed through the use of examples from places where the state was never successful in the first place is disingenuous. There is no unbroken line of descent of contemporary states from Westphalia because most modern states outside Europe, and even some inside, came into being only after 1945. Also, the idea of what states are differs across the theoretical spectrum with the Weberian one used by Lind and Hammes, in which a state possesses a legitimate monopoly on violence, inapplicable to the U.S. given that civilians and state governments are constitutionally empowered to bear arms which would mean that the U.S. is not a state. If a state is defined as a physical base composed of a population and a territorial space governed by legitimate permanent institutions then the Byzantine Empire qualifies as a state long before Westphalia enshrined the notion of sovereignty into European international law. However, sovereignty, supposedly the defining characteristic of states as self-government without external constraint, ‘like power and independence, also varies in degree among states’. Moreover, because of the skewered relationship between imperial centres and their peripheries the post-colonial state as an institution never took deep roots in all but a few examples (such as Canada, Australia and India). Indeed most new states were not even states prior to independence because they were not states within their respective imperial systems. In the case of Africa,
Most of them could be found within the elaborate constitutional framework of the British Empire which included entities such as ‘colonies’ (settled, conquered or ceded), ‘protectorates’ (including ‘colonial protectorates’, ‘international protectorates’ and ‘protected states’), ‘mandates’ or ‘trust territories’, and ‘condominia’. Many British dependencies were constitutional amalgams. The Gold Coast, for example, was a multiple dependency consisting of a settled colony (Gold Coast Colony), a conquered colony (Ashanti), a protectorate (Northern Territories), and a trust territory (British Togoland).

[Tukhachevskii]

Upon independence these states achieved legal sovereignty even though they lacked formal or de facto sovereignty based on institutional coherence and capacity and are thus ‘quasi-states’. State development was further affected by the export of superpower rivalry into the South via proxy wars, the creation of client states and arms transfers to friendly governments and non-state guerrilla groups which accentuated the already fragile political matrix of the region. This centre-periphery relationship continues to this day in a less overt but no less damaging manner and is vital to understanding state-failure especially in relation to the processes of globalisation.

Regarding Globalisation, understood as a largely economic process, it is important to remember that ‘every economic system must rest on a secure political base [...] the international political system constitutes one of the most important constraints on and determinants of markets’. Like Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century, Pax Americana ‘provided the political framework within which these economic and other transnational activities were taking place’. Some states do very well out of globalisation because they underpin it via a state/market symbiosis and reflect the dominance of liberal capitalist states, particular the U.S., over international financial and political organisations. Those that do not generally reside in what the U.S. neoconservative writer Thomas Barnett at the Office of Force Transformation at the Department of Defence called the ‘non-integrating gap’ which is seen as inherently prone to failure, chaos and war (the connection with Lind and Hammes is obvious).

But this is because of economic centre-periphery relations that parallel political conditions in which core imperial states, whose economies function as the centre of the world economy, exploit peripheral states who provide raw materials and resources at rates of exchange favourable to the North but not the South. Order in this region is maintained by a series of semi-peripheral client states, backed up by the core when needed, as well as through the co-optation of the elites of Southern states (the comprador class). Consequently, these comprador elites ‘behave in ways which advance the interests of the core within their own societies rather than in ways which might improve the lot of their compatriots’. In Nigeria for instance the political elite are ‘united in the philosophy of personal enrichment through access to state power’. Access to state power means access to the ‘enormous gains from the sale of crude oil, as a result of OPEC price increases in 1973 and 1978, [which] increased the impetus of the Nigerian politico-military bureaucratic class to primitive accumulation’. As an under-developed Third World ‘Petro-state’ which survives off external rent rather than a domestic tax base Nigeria contains a number of pathologies which include unaccountability to its citizens, vulnerability to domestic subversion, non-transparency, an ineffective bureaucracy and dependency upon external actors. As we have seen in the previous section Nigerian insurgencies are a complicated morass of internationally funded, state-supported and non-state actors all of whom have a complicated relationship to the state (MEND), the regime (NDPVF, NDV), the territory (MOSOP, MASSOB, MOSSIEN) and the international environment (Shell, Total, Chevron). The “non-integrating gap” is precisely so because it is penetrated to such a degree that autonomous action, the exercise of state sovereignty, benefits no-one outside it. Until these policies change insurgencies in states locked in a vicious cycle of self-predation and self-destruction will continue the downward spiral into anarchy. In other words the cause of the insurgency is partly to do with the policies of the West in accentuating and exacerbating the penetrated state as much as they are caused by indigenous and historical forces to do with a weak and in some ways artificial state. On the other hand, in Afghanistan under the USSR and now under NATO the problem is not preserving the failing state but that the Afghan state never really existed in the first place and given local hostility at being forced into the borders of an externally imposed system of governance this crisis is set to continue for some time. It is not Globalisation that is destroying the state but other states and their policies especially in the core.

Interestingly Fourth Generation warfare appears problematic for two types of states in particular; “Liberal-Democratic” and “Developing” or penetrated “Quasi-States”. For authoritarian and non-liberal states the effects of Fourth Generation warfare and its supposed domination of the media-sphere and ability to manipulate international opinion is minimal. Syria crushed the Muslim Brotherhood insurgency in 1982 by virtually destroying the city of Hama and has not faced another insurgency since. In the last Chechen war the Russian army successfully defeated a Fourth Generation (Pan-Islamist) foe with a combination of First, Second and Third generation methods and perhaps being a non-liberal state, for whom international opinion and the “rights” of its opponents were irrelevant, was a distinct advantage. Yet perhaps this is the central issue that Fourth Generation warfare theorists skirt around; the disparity in strategic culture between democracies and their opponents. Democracies, though fierce once committed to battle, are hamstrung by a lack of long-term political will and commitment which, more than brute firepower or high technology, determines the outcome of insurgencies.

[Tukhachevskii]

In conclusion although William Lind seems to revel in the fact that earlier copies of his article may have been read by Al-Qaeda, reportedly found in the caves of Tora Bora, we may rejoice at the confusion it may have sown in their minds if true and assuming a degree of intelligence uncommon among such groups. Ignorant of history and theoretically illogical as a concept “Fourth Generation Warfare” is merely old wine in recycled bottles and not very good wine at that. Insurgencies are, more often than not, complex non-linear phenomena which require a similarly multi-faceted strategy to resolve them. Unlike war between states, which take on and follow regular patterns amenable to generalised prediction, each and every insurgency will have its own specific conditions each of which will require a specially tailored approach. The Gordian knot of war may be easily cut but insurgency requires that the knot be disentangled. Consequently, insurgencies cannot be simply theorised in accordance with a general universal covering law (of the historicist or positivist kind) or pigeon-holed into tidy conceptualised schemata but must be minutely analysed and just as minutely ‘managed’. Thus, Clausewitz’s words of yesteryear, regarding thinkers who believed the key to victory was about dominating key terrain (the “commanding heights”) , is just as relevant when considering the writers of Fourth Generation Warfare and others concerned with the grand theory of “future war”;
"These are the favourite topics of academic soldiers and the magic wands of armchair strategists. Neither the emptiness of such fantasies nor the contradictions of experience have been able to convince these authors and their readers that they were, in effect, pouring water into the leaky vessel of the Danaides. Conditions have been mistaken for the thing itself, the tool for the hand that wields it".

[jmm99]

...general disdain/contempt felt for William Lind and Thommas Hammes....

While many here disagree with excess emphasis on "generations" in warfare, I fail to see a "general distain/contempt" for them as individuals - or that they could be called "lunatics".

Attack the message, not the messenger - officer and gentleman standard.

[slapout9]

While many here disagree with excess emphasis on "generations" in warfare, I fail to see a "general distain/contempt" for them as individuals - or that they could be called "lunatics".

Attack the message, not the messenger - officer and gentleman standard.

Ditto that!!! TX Hammes is no lunatic.