Yes they did seek to promote such a change -- but they didn't do it very well. Attack the elephants verbally as being too large and a huge Bull will just totally ignore you...
They were and are some smart guys but in their sales pitch, they didn't practice what they preach; they tried a frontal assault on a monolith; never a good plan.
As to the four bullets you provide, I submit, in order:
- Not true. You just have to train them properly. if you do not all the focus and direction is to no avail. with proper training, they'll innately know what the focus is. I'd also suggest that the word 'direction' was misunderstood (purposely?) by the Bulls to centralize decision making even more -- thus, the salesman by a poor choice of words hampered their own programs.
- Not true, comments above apply almost in totality.
- True, totally true. What is not addressed is how one trains intuitive competence... . Some have it, some don't. All the doctrine in the world won't fix that. To select for that I agree very much needed capability one has to say that some people are better than others; anathema to the 'egalitarian and meritocratic' US Armed Forces (and to Congress who fostered DOPMA to make sure those Forces didn't get elitist...
- Also totally true; while moral force is just a term, trust is vitally important in the true sense of vital -- because if Commanders do not trust their subordinates they over supervise and hamstring units. That trust is achieved through good training, it cannot be dictated.I disagree with the generational aspect. First, non-state actors are not new; Thugees, assassins and anarchists all precede the adoption of the generational terminology by centuries. I believe non-state actors are a norm, historically and that the relatively artificial world wide suppression of them induced by the predominance of powerful states in the 1900-1990 period of constraint, particularly the Cold War tamped down the non-state effect temporarily. The end of that era allows the world to return to a more historically normal state of scattered chaos....At the same time they seek to illustrate the requirement for a new meme through an exposition of the new operational environment, i.e. the rise of non-state actors as the primary challenge to American/Western national/Geopolitical interests, and express this meme as fourth generation.
The terrible flaw is that the onset of such chaos was predictable (and was predicted), has been broadcast since 1972 or so and was diligently ignored by too many in the corridors of power.Obviously -- and yet, we utterly ignored that in spite of all evidence to the contrary. While the generations of warfare mantra did a good service in delineating the potential, the poor approach to promulgating the issues allowed it to be ignored....If we take Clausewitz’s trinity of state, people and army and recognise that American military superiority is such that no opponent, state or non-state, could hope to militarily defeat the US, we may recognise that any sensible opponent will aim to strike at one of the other foundations – generally choosing the will of the people to sustain a conflict by extending the war’s longevity whilst avoiding direct confrontation and maximising American expenditure of blood and treasure.True but a fact divorced from the MW / 4GW mantra.At the same time a profound change has taken place in the attitude to the utility of force in Western civilisation... Even if we can fix our enemy in one place long enough to apply massive firepower to him we become revolted by the mass extermination of our enemies, without even consideration to the moral effect of any collateral damage to the innocent.Right area, wrong body of water...Even if we refuse to espouse MW ourselves we must be cognisant that our enemies don’t share this view, as we have seen recently in the Red SeaThat's not MW, that's just a common sense METT-T approach using so-called asymmetric warfare. Which in itself is just common sense. Do not attack Bull elephants head on; you've gotta flank 'em....The Iranians clearly see something in this MW stuff, and are actively seeking to shape the battlefield by getting us used to them performing a “Crazy Ivan” whilst permitting them to close to within 200m of our vessels, i.e. where no defence is possible to a multiple missile launch...Actually, that was Ol' Paul Van Riper, LTG USMC (Ret) who I knew when he was a Captain advising a Viet Namese Marine Battalion in 1966. He just applied common sense to the problem...... Where would they get such an idea? Perhaps from an American military exercise conducted several years ago in which a retired Admiral ‘sank’ so many Blue Force ships that the exercise had to be stopped and then restarted because the Red Force was using the ‘wrong’ tactics.
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