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.