"4GW"; "IW"; etc are to my mind all legends we have created to explain what we cannot understand. Humans have always done this over time.

Now, instead of trying to rationalize why there are sea shells on a mountain side, or why the sun rises or the moon goes through phases, we face a much narrower area of human ignorance that leads us to create legends.

Why does a family of "COIN" designed by Western Powers to maintain the profitability of foreign colonies or to contain major threats in the past fail to work equally to stabilize foreign partners today?

Why does the application of war, warfare, and Clausewitzian-logic in general to internal, populace-based conflicts in the modern era either fail to work at all, or if it does, only temporarily so and at a much higher cost to impose and sustain?

It can't be because we never really understood these conflicts to begin with, so it must be because the nature of the conflict itself has somehow changed. Right?

Perhaps. I personally subscribe to the camp (sometimes a lonely campfire to sit around) that we never had this right to begin with. Certainly modern information technologies have (for now) tilted the advantage away from governments and to those population groups who would challenge the systems of governance (foreign and domestic, formal and informal) negatively affecting their lives. But I suspect the nature of such conflicts is not much changed.

That is because the nature of conflict is tied to the nature of man, and not to the technologies man invents.

4GW is a legend that helps some draw comfort regarding something scary and not well understood. But it is not a concept that helps us to deal with such conflicts more effectively. It certainly does not help us better understand how to reduce our own powerful contributions to the causation of such events.