4GW, in my view, is nothing more than a marketing tool/book selling device for people who aren't quite sure what to do with themselves on the weekend.

In all seriousness, 4GW ignores history (by claiming that the majority of its practices began with Mao), relies excessively on sound byte quotes from Sun Tzu and others, and can quite often be boiled down to a smoke and mirrors act. Boyd had some interesting ideas, but to me the greatest accomplishment of those ideas was prodding folks in the Marine Corps to look at how they thought about war and develop the MCDP 1 series.

4GW is really nothing more than non-kinetic maneuver operations accelerated by modern communication methods (specifically the internet) and boosted with a fluid organization taken from the anti-globalization folks and various terrorist networks. A method of organization and operations, but not necessarily a "new" way of war and certainly one that has been around since before the 20th century (look at the operations of the Cuban rebels before the Spanish-American war for just one example).