“Peters’ formulation works well as a starting point in our analysis. Warriors, as he describes them, are difficult to defeat because of the asymmetrical methods by which they fight war. It’s classic fourth generation warfare — dirty, nasty, and ultimately won or lost in the moral sphere.

However, as tough as the the 4GW warrior is, it fails to account for the extreme resilience and innovation we see today in global terrorism and guerrilla warfare. We are also fighting on many more levels that merely the moral one. This implies that something has been left out of this analysis. My conclusion is that it fails to appreciate how globalization has layered new skill sets on ancient mindsets. Warriors, in our current context, are not merely lazy and monosyllabic primitives as Peters implies. They are wired, educated, and globally mobile. They build complex supply chains, benefit from global money flows, and they invest shrewdly. In a nutshell, they are modern.”

Much of Iraq’s insurgency is a part-time, unskilled, bunch of rabble paid a modest sum to lob grenades or shoot wildly with their AK-47’s but there are two far more dangerous clusters of insurgents. Iraqi veterans of the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, Special Security Organization, the Mukhabarat and its Army parallel who possess varying degrees of Soviet Spetsnaz training. A highly disciplined and skilled group that is also backed into a corner – they have nowhere to go and some are too notorious to hide by blending in with the local population. The other dangerous element are the al Qaida affiliated foreign jihadis. They are highly motivated and often suicidal in their willingness to take losses. Some are experienced in combat from Bosnia to Afghanistan.

What are seeing In Iraq and earlier in Somalia is the paradigm for conflicts where the Core attempts to ” export security” and connectivity to the Gap in failed states and defeated rogue regimes. The warriors will run away from the scary, American ” Leviathan” force that will steamroll over them but they will come out of the woodwork, 4GW style, to degrade, demoralize and disrupt attempts at System Administration by the more constabulary-type, nation-builders envisioned by Dr. Barnett. They are Ghazis with laptops.

System Administration forces may have to either be constructed with more ” small wars” expert trigger-pullers to go in and disrupt potential 4GW warrior groupings before they can get started or System Administration and Leviathan will have to work in tandem as a synergistic network.

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