Hybrid Warfare (merged thread)

[slapout9]

Ah the good old days when we new what we stood for. Noo-Ku-Lar Combat!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ynY5NvYsZY

[William F. Owen]

- so cease your Light Division wibbling! (Not so different from a number of Riflemen I know, come to think...)

And I disagree! I think all your examples are have strategic effect - its a question of degree.

Well we could put in another way, and that is these pictures became emblematic of US Strategic failure, but I can't see how a picture of very minor tactical actions can inflate the worth of the tactical action.

The Vietnam pics most definately had a negative impact on the perception of the war, the opinion (right or otherwise) of the legitimacy of the US. And in all these things, Legitimacy, and the perception of it - is the most important strategic factor of all.

Whose legitimacy. Legitimacy, as used by the 4GW crowd is an entirely cultural construct. Legitimacy is really only relevant in that it causes political action.

I think enough Lindie Englands probably can lose the war for you.

How many is enough?
Seriously, yes you are correct, but only when they cause your side to change the policy or the other sides leadership change their intent.
Example: The PIRA killing Lord Mountbatten caused not a blip in UK policy to Ulster, yet there was massive public outrage.
Now did the Sergeants Affair get the UK to leave Palestine. Some say it did, but the evidence is doubtful.
Basically the argument that some News coverage, of a purely tactical act, can alter the course of a conflict means strategic and operational planning is useless since it has to account for a degree of prediction that is essentially impossible. What is more there is no evidence from history that this is the case.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was strategically significant. If the nutty Balkan has shot the Archduke's French Bulldog, "Scipio" no one would have cared... except the British....

I thinks are more complex (and yet more simple) than the old state on state 'big event' paradigm.

War has always been infinitely complex. It cannot become more complex.

[Steve Blair]

Yes, where is General Eisenhower?

Building another military/industrial complex somewhere, no doubt....

[Tukhachevskii]

Comrades,

I have only been a member of the forum for a short while and yet have found my decision to be most rewarding; viz, the general disdain/contempt felt for William Lind and Thommas Hammes. I know it's a long post but please find below the text of a short response I wrote in the space of an evening (and therefore the reasoning may be a little rough around the edges) for a chap by the name of Kristian Gustafson, formerly RCAF, who was teaching Non-Conventional Threats at Brunel University when I was (briefly) enrolled on their MA in Intelligence and Security Studies (thankfully, I came to my senses and left, for a myriad of reasons). His response was...'Perhaps you should read The Sling and the Stone, may be that will convince you'?! Classic, absolutely calssic (the ex-soldiers in the class were also similarly derisive of his comments on 4GW). No footnotes but I hope many of you find the information interesting.




Nigeria and the Three Myths of Fourth Generation Warfare

‘War is more than a true chameleon...’

Almost two centuries ago Clausewitz described the method of critical analysis in the study of war as proceeding in three logical and sequential stages; firstly, the discovery and interpretation of historical facts; secondly, ‘the tracing of effects back to their causes’; and, thirdly, ‘the investigation and evaluation of means employed’. He also warned that ‘effects in war seldom result from a single cause; there are usually several concurrent causes. It is therefore not enough to trace, however honestly and objectively, a sequence of events back to their origin: each identifiable cause still has to be correctly assessed’. Thus, "the primary purpose of any theory is to clarify concepts and ideas that have become, as it were, confused and entangled. Not until terms and concepts have been defined can one hope to make any progress in examining the question clearly and simply and expect the reader to share one’s views".

Neither William Lind nor Thomas Hammes have heeded Clausewitz’s warning or advice in propounding the “confused and entangled” concept of Fourth Generation Warfare. They have cobbled together a number of myths in order to re-invigorate and update guerrilla warfare for the 21st century while covertly pushing an agenda that seeks to raise the profile of the U.S. Marine Corps, hitherto neglected in favour of the ‘sexier’ services such as the Army and Air Force, in the Great War on Terror (GWOT) and ensure it has the ear of budgetary officials in Congress. Their assumption that warfare has evolved through three generations, or paradigms, up to the current fourth is based upon an incoherent understanding or appreciation of military history; that war is generational is the first myth. They also assume, even though they tacitly or accidentally acknowledge that insurgency or guerrilla warfare is of older provenance than first generation warfare, that insurgency in the modern era constitutes a new kind of war; this is the second myth. Following on from this they see its cause as a result of the decline of the state and its hold on the monopoly of violence as new non-state actors come to the fore. This third myth constitutes the Achilles heel of their entire thesis and is as historically incoherent an assumption as it is theoretically simplistic based as it is on the assumption that states everywhere are identical in time, space and capacity. We shall take Clausewitz’s advice and analyse the “confused and entangled” concept of Fourth Generation Warfare in the course of which we shall see that there are very good reasons for William Lind’s lament that ‘no one in the U.S. military “gets it”’.

1st Myth: War is Generational
The first myth concerns warfare as a generational phenomenon the basic rudiments of which are as follows. Modern war can be traced to the end of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia which created states and then gave them monopoly on legitimate violence and thus war making. This system of states then became worldwide and ushered in the First Generation of war. The state provides a wealth-generating economy, a complex social structure allied to nationalism which enables the training and equipping of mass armies as well as the technological base necessary to sustain them with mass produced lightweight artillery and small arms. In the First Generation states engage in war with armies composed of foot-soldiers organised into lines and columns which engage in linear combat exemplified by the wars of Napoleon. This generation is responsible for the distinction between civilian and military as well as a military culture in which hierarchy (ranks and professionalism) and discipline is prevalent creating a culture of order. This generation is thus characterised by mass armed forces.

The Second Generation is characterised by attrition or firepower as the solution to problems raised by First Generation mass armies on the battlefield. Allegedly a French development dating from WWI ‘centrally-controlled artillery’ in conjunction with supporting arms was used to erode and destroy the fighting power of the enemy. Consequently obedience rather than initiative becomes the norm while a parallel deepening of trends evinced in the First continues with the advent of railway transport enabling the strategic and operational concentration of troops, telegraph communications and large-scale logistics.

The Third Generation is manoeuvre centric which originates with Germany in WWI and culminates with Blitzkrieg in WWII in which the tempo of operations is increased through decentralisation which, in unison with surprise and mental and ‘physical dislocation ... seeks to get into the enemy’s rear and collapse him from the rear forward’. Although aircraft, mechanised forces and radio communications are available to all the belligerents only the German army had a leadership inspired enough to seize the initiative afforded by these technologies (and by implication the current U.S leadership does not).

In the current Fourth Generation ‘the state loses its monopoly on war’ and is ‘marked by a return to a world of cultures, not merely states, in conflict’ such as the clash between Christianity and Islam. The ‘universal crisis of legitimacy of the state’ thereby ushers in a whole plethora of non-conventional threats such as ‘invasion by immigration’ which undermines America thanks to the ‘poisonous ideology of multiculturalism’. Fourth Generation warfare is characterised by non-state actors which seek to capitalise on the crisis of the state which is now unable to mobilise against an asymmetrical, i.e., non-state, enemy and who seek to ‘use international, transnational, national and sub-national networks for their own purposes’. The consequence is an age of universal insurgency or a global guerrilla war as exemplified by Mao’s theory of People’s War. Hammes even goes as far as to predict a Fifth Generation of war conducted by ‘super-empowered individuals’ armed with biotechnology. Fourth Generation warfare will be fought by light infantry against an opponent who refuses to acknowledge the Geneva Convention while simultaneously having also to prevent the disintegration of enemy states. Lind’s answer to Marines faced with Fourth Generation warfare is, however, and without any hint of irony, to dust off books about the Spanish guerrilla operations against Napoleon (of the First Generation of mass warfare no less).

The conceptualisation of the evolution of war from Mass (1st) to Attrition (2nd) to Manoeuvre (3rd) to Global Insurgency and the death of the state (4th) is not only theoretically disingenuous but historically inaccurate to say the least even when Lind’s right-wing neo-conservative ideology doesn’t get in the way. We will show this through brief analyses of the Napoleonic wars, World War One and Ancient warfare in relation to generations One to Three. The Fourth Generation issues of insurgency and state failure will be dealt with in later sections.

[Tukhachevskii]

Contrary to Lind and Hammes the First Generation Napoleonic era is understood by historians to be a ‘paradigm of manoeuvre warfare’. Harnessing the levee en masse of the Revolutionary period Napoleon fielded vast numbers of troops organised into semi-autonomous corps d’armée each of which was a miniature combined arms army able to manoeuvre independently and concentrate swiftly for battle. Each corps was composed of infantry and cavalry divisions supported by artillery. The Grand Armée had invested heavily in heavy and light infantry with numerous companies of voltigeurs and tirailleurs, specialised for close combat skirmishing, combined with heavier infantry battalions optimised for firepower. The cavalry was similarly divided into heavy and light formations which could be used for screening and ‘bold shock action against enemy formations weakened by infantry attacks and artillery fire’. Through ‘dexterous coordination of infantry, cavalry and artillery’ the French heavy infantry would, under cover of artillery and skirmishers, deploy ‘in flexible mixtures of lines and columns’ while the enemies fighting power was eroded through artillery and his initiative stymied through threats of or actual cavalry attacks forcing him to deploy into defensive squares rather than manoeuvre to engage. This manoeuvrability and flexibility meant that ‘immense areas of Europe would become war zones as the scattered components of his armies would manoeuvre and converge on their prey’ (an early-modern form of swarming). This system was first disrupted during the Peninsular War in Spain where Napoleon was faced with guerrillas whom the French termed insurgés. Napoleon’s forces were tied down by guerrillas as well as British and Portuguese regular forces which prevented him from concentrating on any one threat. Yet the guerrillas’ general lawlessness made negotiating untenable given that they were largely uncoordinated belonging to differing factions, clans, parties or interest groups rather than the disintegrating central government (the Suprema), and, moreover, spent as much time attacking their fellow countrymen and plundering their own country as they did fighting Napoleon.



The Second Generation of attrition is similarly more nuanced than Lind and Hammes perceive. It was not France but Germany that initiated, under the leadership of Falkenhayn, the strategy of attrition which was instigated after the giant “manoeuvre a priori” of the Schlieffen plan came to a grinding halt. Designed to ‘bleed the French Army white’ Falkenhayn hoped to draw French infantry toward the symbolic fortress of Verdun where, matching his plan to the nature of his enemy, he knew ‘they would launch counterattack after counterattack, as was their fashion, with disregard for life and limb’. Thus with one eye on the forthcoming British Somme offensive he hoped to knock France out of the war through the erosion of their national morale through the mass killing of their troops. However, it was topographical conditions that favoured such an approach in the first place where ‘French positions on the east bank of the river curved in a semicircle from Brabant, on the north, to the Cotes of the Meuse on the south. The northern arc was, therefore, not only subject to direct fire, but could be enfiladed along its whole length by German batteries’. In contrast, the Eastern front was a marked by large-scale manoeuvre given the disparity in force to space ratios which favoured movement allied to superb German signals intelligence (or, Russian incompetence) and is exemplified in the Battle of Tannenberg and the later attack on Rumania by Falkenhayn. In the latter operation Falkenhayn even used motorised (truck borne) infantry as his part of the advance strike element of his 9th Army. Similarly, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan exemplifies the use of firepower to remedy manpower deficiencies and actually came to replace manoeuvre as the preferred method of Soviet counterinsurgency operations.

[Tukhachevskii]

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.

[Tukhachevskii]

Secessionist insurgencies revolve around ethnic and economic issues concerning Nigerian oil resources which are located in small ethnic territories. The Movement for the Survival of the Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN) is engaged in a secessionist insurgency demanding greater political and economic autonomy or outright independence. As is the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) who represent the Ibo-speaking south eastern regions and have increased their activity after the corrupt elections of April 2007 and have called for a UN supervised plebiscite. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was originally a non-violent protest group demanding economic empowerment who then adopted armed resistance and secessionist goals after a number of violent Nigerian police and military crackdowns.

International oil companies such as Chevron, Total and Shell are also involved in the insurgent matrix. They pay local militias for protection against other groups as well as paying off local opposition groups with ‘cash payments’. Oil companies also undermine the central government buy providing ‘monthly pay and perks, including housing, transport, meals and medical services to police, army and navy personnel deployed to protect their installations’. Shell admits to importing arms and ammunition from a Lagos arms dealer for its affiliates whereas Total officially states that Nigerian officials, such as supernumerary police and commissioners, are its own employees.

In 2005 an umbrella insurgency group appeared claiming to represent the entire Niger Delta called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and has been by far the most lethal and professional of the insurgent groups. MEND demands that 20-50 percent of oil revenues be redistributed back to local communities in the oil producing regions through local community governed foundations rather than the corrupt and un-transparent patronage system used currently. Nonetheless MEND is also linked with local politics involving struggles between the ethnic groups it purports to represent as well as continued attacks on oil pipelines and refineries in order to steal oil for finance purposes (‘oil-bunkering’).

State violence is also endemic with extra-judicial killings in 2003 amounting to 3,100 deaths in the
Ogoni state alone which led MOSOP to take arms. On 19th February 2005 the Nigerian Army destroyed 78 homes and killed countless civilians in what was supposed to be an operation against a local criminal-cult group called Isenasawo after reports of communal fighting between Odioma and Obioku residents. Instead of attacking Isenasawo, who are often used by local and regional actors to secure pipelines, the army attacked innocent civilians.

3rd Myth: Globalisation is destroying the State
By arguing that the state has failed through the use of examples from places where the state was never successful in the first place is disingenuous. There is no unbroken line of descent of contemporary states from Westphalia because most modern states outside Europe, and even some inside, came into being only after 1945. Also, the idea of what states are differs across the theoretical spectrum with the Weberian one used by Lind and Hammes, in which a state possesses a legitimate monopoly on violence, inapplicable to the U.S. given that civilians and state governments are constitutionally empowered to bear arms which would mean that the U.S. is not a state. If a state is defined as a physical base composed of a population and a territorial space governed by legitimate permanent institutions then the Byzantine Empire qualifies as a state long before Westphalia enshrined the notion of sovereignty into European international law. However, sovereignty, supposedly the defining characteristic of states as self-government without external constraint, ‘like power and independence, also varies in degree among states’. Moreover, because of the skewered relationship between imperial centres and their peripheries the post-colonial state as an institution never took deep roots in all but a few examples (such as Canada, Australia and India). Indeed most new states were not even states prior to independence because they were not states within their respective imperial systems. In the case of Africa,
Most of them could be found within the elaborate constitutional framework of the British Empire which included entities such as ‘colonies’ (settled, conquered or ceded), ‘protectorates’ (including ‘colonial protectorates’, ‘international protectorates’ and ‘protected states’), ‘mandates’ or ‘trust territories’, and ‘condominia’. Many British dependencies were constitutional amalgams. The Gold Coast, for example, was a multiple dependency consisting of a settled colony (Gold Coast Colony), a conquered colony (Ashanti), a protectorate (Northern Territories), and a trust territory (British Togoland).

[Tukhachevskii]

Upon independence these states achieved legal sovereignty even though they lacked formal or de facto sovereignty based on institutional coherence and capacity and are thus ‘quasi-states’. State development was further affected by the export of superpower rivalry into the South via proxy wars, the creation of client states and arms transfers to friendly governments and non-state guerrilla groups which accentuated the already fragile political matrix of the region. This centre-periphery relationship continues to this day in a less overt but no less damaging manner and is vital to understanding state-failure especially in relation to the processes of globalisation.

Regarding Globalisation, understood as a largely economic process, it is important to remember that ‘every economic system must rest on a secure political base [...] the international political system constitutes one of the most important constraints on and determinants of markets’. Like Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century, Pax Americana ‘provided the political framework within which these economic and other transnational activities were taking place’. Some states do very well out of globalisation because they underpin it via a state/market symbiosis and reflect the dominance of liberal capitalist states, particular the U.S., over international financial and political organisations. Those that do not generally reside in what the U.S. neoconservative writer Thomas Barnett at the Office of Force Transformation at the Department of Defence called the ‘non-integrating gap’ which is seen as inherently prone to failure, chaos and war (the connection with Lind and Hammes is obvious).

But this is because of economic centre-periphery relations that parallel political conditions in which core imperial states, whose economies function as the centre of the world economy, exploit peripheral states who provide raw materials and resources at rates of exchange favourable to the North but not the South. Order in this region is maintained by a series of semi-peripheral client states, backed up by the core when needed, as well as through the co-optation of the elites of Southern states (the comprador class). Consequently, these comprador elites ‘behave in ways which advance the interests of the core within their own societies rather than in ways which might improve the lot of their compatriots’. In Nigeria for instance the political elite are ‘united in the philosophy of personal enrichment through access to state power’. Access to state power means access to the ‘enormous gains from the sale of crude oil, as a result of OPEC price increases in 1973 and 1978, [which] increased the impetus of the Nigerian politico-military bureaucratic class to primitive accumulation’. As an under-developed Third World ‘Petro-state’ which survives off external rent rather than a domestic tax base Nigeria contains a number of pathologies which include unaccountability to its citizens, vulnerability to domestic subversion, non-transparency, an ineffective bureaucracy and dependency upon external actors. As we have seen in the previous section Nigerian insurgencies are a complicated morass of internationally funded, state-supported and non-state actors all of whom have a complicated relationship to the state (MEND), the regime (NDPVF, NDV), the territory (MOSOP, MASSOB, MOSSIEN) and the international environment (Shell, Total, Chevron). The “non-integrating gap” is precisely so because it is penetrated to such a degree that autonomous action, the exercise of state sovereignty, benefits no-one outside it. Until these policies change insurgencies in states locked in a vicious cycle of self-predation and self-destruction will continue the downward spiral into anarchy. In other words the cause of the insurgency is partly to do with the policies of the West in accentuating and exacerbating the penetrated state as much as they are caused by indigenous and historical forces to do with a weak and in some ways artificial state. On the other hand, in Afghanistan under the USSR and now under NATO the problem is not preserving the failing state but that the Afghan state never really existed in the first place and given local hostility at being forced into the borders of an externally imposed system of governance this crisis is set to continue for some time. It is not Globalisation that is destroying the state but other states and their policies especially in the core.

Interestingly Fourth Generation warfare appears problematic for two types of states in particular; “Liberal-Democratic” and “Developing” or penetrated “Quasi-States”. For authoritarian and non-liberal states the effects of Fourth Generation warfare and its supposed domination of the media-sphere and ability to manipulate international opinion is minimal. Syria crushed the Muslim Brotherhood insurgency in 1982 by virtually destroying the city of Hama and has not faced another insurgency since. In the last Chechen war the Russian army successfully defeated a Fourth Generation (Pan-Islamist) foe with a combination of First, Second and Third generation methods and perhaps being a non-liberal state, for whom international opinion and the “rights” of its opponents were irrelevant, was a distinct advantage. Yet perhaps this is the central issue that Fourth Generation warfare theorists skirt around; the disparity in strategic culture between democracies and their opponents. Democracies, though fierce once committed to battle, are hamstrung by a lack of long-term political will and commitment which, more than brute firepower or high technology, determines the outcome of insurgencies.

[Tukhachevskii]

In conclusion although William Lind seems to revel in the fact that earlier copies of his article may have been read by Al-Qaeda, reportedly found in the caves of Tora Bora, we may rejoice at the confusion it may have sown in their minds if true and assuming a degree of intelligence uncommon among such groups. Ignorant of history and theoretically illogical as a concept “Fourth Generation Warfare” is merely old wine in recycled bottles and not very good wine at that. Insurgencies are, more often than not, complex non-linear phenomena which require a similarly multi-faceted strategy to resolve them. Unlike war between states, which take on and follow regular patterns amenable to generalised prediction, each and every insurgency will have its own specific conditions each of which will require a specially tailored approach. The Gordian knot of war may be easily cut but insurgency requires that the knot be disentangled. Consequently, insurgencies cannot be simply theorised in accordance with a general universal covering law (of the historicist or positivist kind) or pigeon-holed into tidy conceptualised schemata but must be minutely analysed and just as minutely ‘managed’. Thus, Clausewitz’s words of yesteryear, regarding thinkers who believed the key to victory was about dominating key terrain (the “commanding heights”) , is just as relevant when considering the writers of Fourth Generation Warfare and others concerned with the grand theory of “future war”;
"These are the favourite topics of academic soldiers and the magic wands of armchair strategists. Neither the emptiness of such fantasies nor the contradictions of experience have been able to convince these authors and their readers that they were, in effect, pouring water into the leaky vessel of the Danaides. Conditions have been mistaken for the thing itself, the tool for the hand that wields it".

[jmm99]

...general disdain/contempt felt for William Lind and Thommas Hammes....

While many here disagree with excess emphasis on "generations" in warfare, I fail to see a "general distain/contempt" for them as individuals - or that they could be called "lunatics".

Attack the message, not the messenger - officer and gentleman standard.

[slapout9]

While many here disagree with excess emphasis on "generations" in warfare, I fail to see a "general distain/contempt" for them as individuals - or that they could be called "lunatics".

Attack the message, not the messenger - officer and gentleman standard.

Ditto that!!! TX Hammes is no lunatic.

[William F. Owen]

I have only been a member of the forum for a short while and yet have found my decision to be most rewarding; viz, the general disdain/contempt felt for William Lind and Thommas Hammes.

Whoah there boyo. I know both Lind and Hammes. I cannot speak for all here, but I am firmly against, Manoeuvre Warfare and 4GW. In no way do I hold any contempt or disdain for either man. I think their ideas are misleading, but that in no way effects by personal feeling for them. Good guys.

....and don't get me started on Mr "Deep Battle" Tukhachevskii!

[Tukhachevskii]

Duly noted. You're right, of course, ad hominem attacks aren't very sportsman like. I think it was a case of transfering my antipathy towards one individual in particular and superimposing it upon Lind and Hammes. Nonethelss, apologies all round.

[BRICK0302]

You all seem to take the name for “hybrid war” quite seriously, but there has been little discussion about the purpose of such a label. I believe that using the term “hybrid war” can be instructive for someone actually confronted with it. We naturally try to compartmentalize complex information to simplify it, which undoubtedly results in us excluding relevant information. A term like “hybrid” forces the individual to recognize the fusion of what could easily be compartmentalized into “conventional” or “regular” and “asymmetric” or “irregular war.” Is there a difference between irregular and hybrid war? As I see it there is. Imagine if we had to fight the conventional Iraqi forces of OIF 1 and the irregular forces of OIF II at the same time? We certainly would not have been prepared for it, we may not be prepared for it now. In hybrid war the opponent can force us to deploy conventional forces by offering a “regular” target as well as the need for force protection against their “conventional” capability. This may be a Hezbollah rocket battery or regiment of Viet Cong Regulars. With such threats on the battlefield, you can’t simply rely on the formations and tactics required for successful COIN, nor would many commanders resist the temptation to not pursue these "regular targets" at the expense of controlling the population. These situations are challenging because forces must simultaneously be prepared to deal with these two unique and separate threats. When these forces are working in concert it is certainly a challenge modern armies have not prepared for. I would posit that although nothing in war may be “new,” a new understanding (or a review of old understanding) of “hybrid war” is warranted. With only a superficial understanding of Vietnamese “People’s War Doctrine” I can see that their use of conventional forces for achieving limited objectives forces their opponent to maintain a costly conventional force presence that simultaneously undermines their success in the Vietnamese main effort which is control of the people. They used to great affect against us during the Vietnam War while we simultaneously attempted conventional and COIN strategies that were not always fused or mutually supporting. There is the space that exists for a new understanding of this not new dynamic. If a new name helps us to recognize that this fusion exists, then “Hybrid War” is as good a word as any, and it has certainly helped me. When I think of “Hybrid War” I do not consider 4GW or modern capabilities, I only think about an enemy that fights simultaneously on two small but unconnected spectrums. The result is a requirement to have two different capabilities to meet these two threats. The kicker is that each of our capabilities is at best suboptimal and at worse actually detrimental to countering the enemy’s threat that that our capability doesn’t mirror (our conventional Forces are not good for COIN and our COIN forces are not optimal for conventional combat). When both of the enemy’s forces occupy close space on the battlefield, its can become a wicked problem. Add non-state actors, organized crime and all the rest and you’ve got an old problem that may deserve a new label.

[jmm99]

Please make use of the Hail & Farewell forum (and your User Profile) to introduce yourself. It provides context for those reading your posts.

With respect to this thread (without getting into the merits of using the term "hybrid" militarily), I think it's important to distinguish between the words "war" (an armed conflict) and "warfare" (how that armed conflict is conducted). That distinction applies both legally (on that, I'm on firm ground) and militarily (on which, I've placed reliance on the opinions of others - such as Wilf).

From a legal standpoint, there is no such thing as a "hybrid war" - you either have a "war" (defined in Hague terms), or an "armed conflict" (defined in Geneva terms, which are broader than Hague), or you do not.

Legally, one might speak in terms of "hybrid warfare"; that is warfare involving state and non-state actors; or warfare involving regular combatants and irregular combatants; or warfare involving the political struggle and the military struggle (common to all warfare, except perhaps the ultimate state of "absolute war" in CvC's theoretical sense). However, using that term in any particular context is meaningless unless the context is particularly defined. In which case, you probably do not need the term.

PS: I originally said that Geneva's terms are "slightly broader" than Hague. That is true for state on state armed conflicts. However, Geneva (via Common Articles 2 & 3) introduced the concept of "Powers" to armed conflicts which are not nation-states. Since most conflicts since 1990 have involved at least one non-state actor ("powers" not signatory to Geneva), Geneva in that respect is infinitely broader than Hague.

[Bill Moore]

Legally, one might speak in terms of "hybrid warfare"; that is warfare involving state and non-state actors; or warfare involving regular combatants and irregular combatants; or warfare involving the political struggle and the military struggle (common to all warfare, except perhaps the ultimate state of "absolute war" in CvC's theoretical sense). However, using that term in any particular context is meaningless unless the context is particularly defined. In which case, you probably do not need the term.

I'm not a fan of hybrid warfare, because like many I have long recognized it has a norm of warfare throughout the ages, BUT we all recall more than one senior officer during OIF saying "no one told me about this threat". If nothing else it provides a cool buzz phrase (the U.S. military can't function without cool buzz phrases) describing the full spectrum of threats during warfare. It shouldn't be required, but it is, because the U.S. military is still attempting to break free from the Fulda Gap paradigm of warfare. We have come a long ways, but not far enough that we won't be bounce back into it if allowed. It will take a new generation of leaders, probably the ones who are relatively junior field grades now. Of course by then the nature of the threat will have changed and all our soldiers will be well versed in foreign languages and how to fix sewage systems, and yet once again ill prepared for the next threat. What we really need to invest in is a better crystal ball .

[selil]

I've often thought of hybrid warfare as a nice little synonym for full spectrum of operations.

You know ALL the ways of conflict. Acceptance of Air operations through civil operations.

Wowser. In many ways it is simply war.

[goesh]

- it went 'hybrid' when the first Neanderthal man was dropped at 40' by a Cro-Magnon man using at atlatl. The Neanderthal crew saw him lying on the ground, his club and short, burnt-end wooden stabbing spear beside him and they ran like hell back to their cave and thus began the interplay of mind, matter and weaponry and it's been mutual adoption and adaptation ever since....

[slapout9]

- it went 'hybrid' when the first Neanderthal man was dropped at 40' by a Cro-Magnon man using at atlatl. The Neanderthal crew saw him lying on the ground, his club and short, burnt-end wooden stabbing spear beside him and they ran like hell back to their cave and thus began the interplay of mind, matter and weaponry and it's been mutual adoption and adaptation ever since....

Yea, and they were wearing those Man thongy things to....that is where tu tu comes from isn't it

[goesh]

You betcha' slap and it gave us the ol' zip gun too - somwhere in your Dept.s evidence room there are probably one or two stashed somehwere covered in dust. From flint-tipped 'hellfire' missles of 10,000 BC to our platforms of today, its almost moot to regard the concept of "hybrid" as something modern but that's just one man's opinion. I see a pattern change though that is distinct, mainly the quality of civilian input and direct involvement in military affairs in some very non-traditional ways, hence my previous qualifier of "almost moot" - now a camo tu tu would be a hybrid in my opinion.