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.