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".