And I thought I was going to get my thread started on the OODA Loop, but this distracted me. Okay, here goes.

Most of the criticism about 4GW revolves around it's extremely shaky foundations as a theoretical construct, an analytical lens, or any number of uses as tool for understanding military history. Okay, ALL OF THESE CRITICISMS ARE VALID. But the 4GW characterization was never intended for the uses that so many appear to attribute to it.

Look, if this was a serious historical construct, it would not have been published in the Marine Corps Gazette. It would have shown up in a scholarly journal.

Okay, I was pretty much in thick with John Schmitt and Bill Lind at the time the original 4GW article was published and got to know G.I. Wilson and Keith Nightengale much later. So let me provide some context so you can understand the purposes of the original authors, at least from my perspective.

First of all, the "three generations of war" was pretty slick shorthand for charaterizing tactics and command and control. In other words, they were intended as labels. Extremely simplistic labels. But using them, one could describe what one saw on the battlefield. For example, The ROK Marines are a first generation ground force. Tactics of line and column, culture of control, extreme hierarchical command on the Frederickan mold. Discipline enforced by liberal doses of corporal punishment. I say "first generation" and everybody understands--I don't have to describe much more of the basics but can then dive into the details.

Regarding the so-called "linear progression" of the generations, it's true--it's doesn't work. Bruce Gudmudsson calls the development of 2nd and 3rd Generation warfare as "the fork in the road" in his book, On Infantry (Revised Edition). He was doing this pretty early on as I recall him saying this when Bill, Bruce, and I were doing the "Modern War" television show in the Spring of 1994. When "first generation" wasn't working due to the requirement for open order tactics, you saw this split--a focus on firepower at the expense of maneuver and still the rigid culture of order left from the first generation (this is 2nd Gen)...and then what we term as MW (3GW). Lord knows, it's a terrible labeling scheme. Just like the term "maneuver warfare." It was a bumper sticker, and it stuck, showing up in Marine Corps correspondence courses like MCI 7400 WARFIGHING SKILLS PROGRAM.

But I need to emphasize--these generational characterizations were labels applied to descriptions of tactics and C2. It took TX Hammes to flesh them out a great deal in The Sling and Stone and put the historical backdrop behind them and provide an air of historical/analytical basis where none existed before. Should he have done this? I'll let you debate it. We in the field Marine units could have given a rat's *ss. We liked the shorthand labels.

Then came 4GW. It was Bill's label. And the paradox of it was that it didn't describe a tactical or command and control method at all. It described social conditions leading to the value systems of the warriors and explained how traditional operational art and military strategy wasn't going to be sufficient against these people. So why did Bill label it this way? I can only guess--because as soon as you describe 4GW in response to a question, the next question is what are the other three generations. And then you get the short course in the development of MW.

I'm not defending this. It's just how I perceived it at the time.

Now, the caveat. I'm a believer in the concept, although I agree with Echevarria that the term has become too synonymous with the idea of insurgency in general (blame TX Hammes in The Sling and the Stone which changed the original meaning of 4GW) and Iraq in particular (and Lind's "On War' columns in Military.com may have had something to do with that). I still adhere to the original conceptions as outlined in the earlier articles. Hammes' 5GW is more akin to what the original authors envisioned, although they didn't see the potential for "super-empowerment" as we now conceive of it.

But 4GW was still a label to describe a condition. It wasn't intended for the historians. It wasn't created for the defense analysts. It wasn't meant for the academics. It was for the field Marines who needed a shorthand term to describe the Cartels, the Somalia clans, the warring tribes and families, etc. To basically mean that pure military force wasn't going work against these characters. In that sense this bumper sticker label still works, even though the numbering system is misleading and the idea of "generations" just doesn't hold throughout under any serious historical investigation or analysis. Remember, this is the Marine Corps. "It's easy to be hard, and hard to be smart." And the corollary: "I'm not smart, and you can't make me." I'll just leave it at that. I'm not defending it, but I'm explaining it.

So, the bottom line up front for you non-jarhead types: This was never intended for you. Not really. Not originally.

Of course, the proponents--Bill Lind among them--were only too happy to see this particular genie escape the lamp and cause all kinds of debate and rhetorical havoc. And I think it's been a good thing for all the reasons we've seen in other threads about MW. People have to ask questions and defend their points of view...and constantly rethink their assumptions.

This is no doubt a gross summary/oversimplification of nearly twenty years of serious thought and discussion, but I thought I'd open up this particular Pandora's Box since CavGuy started this thread.