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THE 4GW FESTIVAL OF FABIUS MAXIMUS

” To summarize, we seek to radically change the cultures and political systems for much of the world, to halt foreign revolts and civil wars of which we do not approve, to bring global peace and prosperity, to make friends (even with those states whose rise we seek to restrain), and to “transform” our so far unreformable national security apparatus. Those who thought President Bush was kidding about these learned better in the months following our invasion of Iraq.”

– Fabius Maximus

For some time now, an author whose nom de guerre is “Fabius Maximus”, after the ancient Roman general of the Punic wars, has been a regular and at times, prolific, contributor to the Boydian and 4GW school oriented Defense & the National Interest. Fabius, who comments here at Zenpundit on occasion, also set off one of the most popular, if heated and controversial, threads at The Small Wars Council, catching the attention of noted COIN strategist Col. David Kilcullen. Kilcullen’s theories later became a subject of frequent critique from Fabius in his DNI articles.

While I had hoped to meet Fabius in person at Boyd 2007, he did not attend and I am not privy to his identity or professional background. Fabius’ arguments must rise or fall entirely on their own merit and he has been content to engage his critics on this basis at the SWC and elsewhere. Clearly he is a member of the 4GW school and is an admirer of Col. John Boyd, William Lind, Dr. Martin van Creveld and Dr. Chet Richards but has not shrunk from advancing his own ideas or original criticisms.

Recently, Fabius completed his tenth article in a series on America’s Long War for DNI and, as Fabius has entertained and enraged members of the community of “reform” defense intellectuals and COIN practitioners, it is timely for us to take stock of his strategic argument:

The Long War Series – from DNI’s Fabius Maximus Archive

Part X – One step beyond Lind: what is America’s geopolitical strategy?
Part IX – 4GW at work in a community near you,
Part VIII – How to accurately forecast trends of the Iraq War,
Part VII – Kilcullen explains all you need to know about the Iraq War,
Part VI – The bad news is that Lind’s good news is wrong,
Part V – The Iraq War as a warning for America,
Part IV – Beyond Insurgency: An End to Our War in Iraq,
Part III – Stories or statistics? Read and compare to find the truth!
Part II – News from the Front: America’s military has mastered 4GW!
Part I – America takes another step towards the “Long War,”

I have read the roughly 20,000 words offered here previously and I re-read them for this post. I have also read most of the authors of the original works that Fabius Maximus cites in his series. Therefore, I feel qualified to offer a few observations in regard to the strategic paradigm that this body of work represents and the assumptions, clearly stated as well as implicit, upon which it is built.

Many of the specific analytical criticisms of American policy and performance in Iraq and Afghanistan made by Fabius are incisive, some are rather questionable and a few are brilliant. I encourage you to read his efforts for yourself rather than simply accepting my word for it. What interests me most though, given the scope of the series, are his premises. As I discern them, they are:

That 4GW is the environment in which we find ourselves conducting operations – and doing so quite poorly at that with a military predisposed toward 2GW offensives. Or irrelevantly on the strategic level where we happen to be executing COIN well on the tactical level.

We cannot significantly affect the internal dynamics of alien societies that we understand poorly or not at all, regardless of the carrots or sticks used. We are marginal factors at best.

American war policy is being constructed on the false analogy of the Cold War model.

Al Qaida is more phantom than menace.

War is the wrong conceptual metaphor and the wrong operational-bureaucratic response to the conflict in which we find ourselves.

Our response, which serves bureaucratic and factional interests at homes, undermines our global strategic position and wastes our economic strength.

A better grand strategy for America is nonintervention and reducing friction with the rest of the world. Or failing that, at least bolstering states, any states, rather than collapsing them into failure with military attack or other pressures ( Lind’s “Centers of Order vs. Centers of Disorder”)

If George Kennan argued for “Containment” of Soviet Communism in his “X” article the best descriptor of the grand strategy of Fabius Maximus might be ” Conservancy” – dialing down our kinetic response to terrorism to the surgical level and recognizing this contest as more ideological conflict than war and, in general, recognizing our limitations in attempting to become masters of the universe. Many readers would associate this paradigm with the Left but I believe that to be incorrect. Instead, reflecting a deeply paleoconservative reading of history and American traditions in foreign policy that historian Walter A. McDougal called “Promised Land” and others “city on a hill” and ” isolationism”.

The virtues of “conservancy” as I interpret Fabius is that it minimizes both costs and future commitments for the United States, leaving us better able to afford to deal with strategic threats to vital national interests, when unanticipated threats arise, as they surely will. It would serve as a reality check on statesmen to pursue fewer, more coherent, simpler, more easily realizable and markedly cheaper objectives, which will have far higher probability of success ( as opposed to say, attacking Iran while engaged in Iraq. Or perhaps invading Russia in winter or fighting a land war in Asia. Some folks around PACOM with a few years ago with uber-journalist Robert Kaplan’s ear, thought an unprovoked war with China was a splendid idea). When forced to intervene, our footprint will be light; more like British frontier agents of old or the 55 advisers in El Salvador in the 1980’s than the invasion of Iraq. As a nation, our foreign policy would stay on the good side of the diminishing returns curve.

The drawbacks include, in my view: being flatly incorrect about al Qaida’s potential to initiate attacks on the operational or strategic level specifically, and about the threat of radical Islamist-Mahdist movements in general, when coupled with increasing capacities to leverage against complex systems ( see John Robb’s Brave New War); underestimating the geopolitical ripple effect of the U.S. shifting to a conservancy posture, upending the global security arrangements upon which the calculations of statesmen currently depend. The unanticipated consequences of the latter are large. Within two to three levels of unfolding decision-tree possibilities, any potential response by the U.S. is simply swamped. We benefit by the status quo. Changing our position imposes costs.

I invite Fabius Maximus to respond as he likes and I will publish his remarks here, unedited. Readers are invited to offer their own critique in the comments section.

5GW: LOOKING FOR DIFFERENCES OF KIND, NOT DEGREE

William Lind had an interesting piece on the weaknesses inherent in decentralized, 4GW insurgencies ( hat tip John Robb). Which in turn, led me to ask myself a question:

How do we know the difference from a state military that has adapted sufficiently to fight 4GW-style warfare effectively from a state military that has moved into waging 5GW decisively ? Where is the demarcation point ?

THE 4GW ANTI-STATE

“al Qaidastan” Rising

Fourth Generation Warfare, according to it’s leading theorists, is designed to challenge the legitimacy of the state. It’s “kinetic” attacks are really a form of ju-jitsu designed to strike the enemy society at the mental and moral levels and thereby cripple the state apparatus through which modern nation-states govern themselves.

Repeated successful mitary forays by 4GW entities, perhaps in alliance with local ethnic and criminal organizations, can create a “TAZ” or temporary autonomous zone, outside the rule of law. “Temporary” is a useful descriptor because, frequently, police, paramilitary or Army units are able to “re-take” the TAZ from 4GW control because these decentralized forces melt away, go underground or shift to a less direct form of conflict such as system disruption or the use of IED type munitions.

However, there are now enough examples of recent vintage to tentatively answer the question of what happens when a TAZ under the domination of a 4GW group slides toward permanency? Al Qaida, is now doing so for the second time in it’s history, as detailed by Pramit Pal Chaudhuri:

“Confederation of Terror

On September 6 the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan marked the first anniversary of its de facto recognition. On that day last year, the Taliban used the name when it signed a ceasefire agreement with the Pakistani government. The ceasefire is in tatters, but the terror trail of the recent plots in Germany and Denmark indicates that the Emirate is doing fine.

The “al Qaedaization” of the Taliban can be seen in their use of suicide bombing, human shields and bloodier kidnappings, practices abhorrent in traditional Pashtun culture. The Afghan government has no doubt this represents foreign tutelage. Says the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., Said Tayeb Jawad: “Al Qaeda is the commander, the Taliban the foot soldier. Al Qaeda provides strategic guidance“

William Lind, during the Israeli-Hezbollah War, suggested that after having attained a critical mass of legitimacy through sustained political-military success, 4GW organizations faced a choice of “To Be or Not To Be, a State“. Lind argued that statehood was equivalent with vulnerable “targetability” and that Westphalian-era mummery was something that 4GW forces could best do without.

To an extent, Lind was correct. Neither Hezbollah, nor the Islamic Courts Union, HAMAS, al Qaida or even the Taliban during the period of their rule of Afghanistan, have ever formed a proper and recognized state apparatus. Nor have they, when enjoying longer-term territorial control, remained covert guerilla-terrorist networks either. Instead, they have tried to lock in their comparative advantages with an Anti-State model existing alongside or symbiotically integrated with, the sovereign state.

The 4GW Anti-State has certain recognizable characteristics or tendencies:

*Corporative: The 4GW organization openly lives by it’s own codes, not the state’s, with final authority for enforcement. The 4GW entity may impose these codes on the people over whom they exist (Taliban), or apply them primarily to their own membership (HAMAS) but the state has de facto ceded that prerogative.

*Post-Westphalian: The borders and claims of the nation-state are irrelevant, whether we are discussing a Pushtunistan-based “al Qaidastan” that crosses the Durand Line or a Transnational Criminal Organization network like a Russian mafiya clan with cells under discipline from Novgorod to Brighton Beach to Budapest to Tel Aviv. The 4GW Anti-State can be geographic or virtual as the primary loyalty attachment for the membership is a psychological and social one.

*Hegemonic Governance: The 4GW entity frequently, as HAMAS and Hezbollah have amply demonstrated, provide a sophisticated array of public goods and other services, often free of charge, in order to cultivate political legitimacy among the larger population. They do not accept all of the de jure responsibilities for the local population that are normally traditional for a rcognized sovereign and suppress rival authorities or independent-minded individuals with arbitrary force. In matters outside of the interests of the 4GW entity, residents are left to their own devices ( or the mercy of smaller predators) so that resources are conserved.

*Symbiotic Coexistence: The 4GW group is shielded, to a degree, from international intervention by coexisting within the confines of a recognized and sovereign nation-state that is unwilling (Sudan, Iran) or unable (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq) to bring them to heel and even more unwilling to let outsiders do so. Like a parasite, a 4GW entity, if unchecked, is capable of hijacking it’s host nation-state to serve it’s own needs as al Qaida did in Afghanistan before 9/11.

The Anti-State model is useful for 4GW forces at a certain threshold of magnitude because it offers some of the defensive advantages of statehood with far fewer of the responsibilities or liabilities with running a state.

UPDATE:

John Robb was kind enough to link and had this comment:

“Mark, over at ZenPundit, has an excellent (!) post on the virtual-state (not sure that 4GW, as a description of a form of warfare, works as a label for this). “

Thanks, John! I’m not sure it works either – LOL! An explanation though:

I used “4GW” primarily because I was interested in how such movements are developing semi-permanent, alternative, forms of governance to the nation-state. Bobbitt’s “Virtual-State” could work well in many instances for what 4GW forces are in a structural or behavioral sense but the term also has broader application.

Then there is also the issue where 4GW entity is overlapping pre-modern (at times, ancient), subnational, territorial/tribal identities that are the very antithesis of “the state”. A schizoid hybrid, if you will. The analogy can be misleading because these phenomena have aspects that are very unlike the state of Max Weber, despite usurping some of the functions, so I used ” Anti-State”. I’m not wedded to the term yet as the whole issue needs more fleshing out and discussion (and as Fabius noted in the comments, empirical investigation).

GUEST POSTING AT DEMOCRACY PROJECT

My friend, Bruce Kesler was gracious enough to offer me a guest posting opportunity on the topic of 4GW at the well-respected group blog Democracy Project. Bruce’s only proviso was that the piece should be aimed at the general reader and not the academic specialist or military professional and I have endeavored to comply.

With far more patience than I deserve, Bruce waited for me to finally get my post together and he has put it up this evening:

“4GW Primer“

Much thanks to Bruce Kesler for allowing me to expound on this topic for DP readers!

PART II: THE IDEAS AT BOYD 2007

The ideas and arguments presented at Boyd 2007 were stimulating and, at times, controversial. I’m still pondering the implications of many of them and regret that I could not attend the next day’s follow-up discussion organized by Don Vandergriff (reportedly, AE of Simulated Laughter was present. Hopefully, he will review it). I took many notes and here are my impressions of the sessions:

Colonel Frans Osinga and Dr. Chet Richards:

These back to back presentations were the ones that dealt in depth with the strategic theories of John Boyd, particularly the meaning and use of the famous OODA Loop. Osinga’s major point was that the OODA Loop really reflected the deeper epistemological themes in Boyd’s research of military history, theoretical science and strategy; that Boyd’s strategic worldview was “neo-Darwinian” and geared to the adaptive competitive fitness of systems in conflict.

Richards focused on the overriding importance of the implicit in the OODA Loop, serving as guidance and control for Orientation and empowering the ability of individuals and harmoniously aligned groups (” novelty-generating systems” ) to sieze and retain the initiative over their opponents. The purpose of the OODA Loop is to ” reduce your opponents to a quivering mass of jelly” ( and here Richards means the complex version of OODA, not the simple circular version) by creating disharmony in the other side even as you improve your own.

William Lind, Colonel TX Hammes, Frank Hoffman, Bruce Gudmundsson on 4GW:

I am conflating several sessions here and probably will not or cannot to justice to the views of all of the participants. Anyone who was also there, please feel free to offer corrections or extensions in the comment section.

William Lind was the most colorful and entertaining speaker at Boyd 2007 and, unsurprisingly if you have followed Lind’s writings at all, the most radical in his arguments for 4GW. To an extent, many of the participants were responding to Lind’s thesis as much as they were putting forth their own arguments. Frank Hoffman is somewhat excepted, as his role was a designated devil’s advocate critiquing the weaknesses of the 4GW theory from the viewpoint of mainstream military historians and defense policy academics.

Lind opened by postulating “Three great Civil Wars” – namely WWI, WWII and the Cold War – that irreparably weakened Western civilization physically and, most importantly, morally and led to the rise of 4GW. This view is akin to Philip Bobbitt’s concept of the 20th century ” Long War” and Niall Ferguson’s gloomy interpretaion of the First World War. In Lind’s view, this civilizational loss of confidence set in motion by the horrors of the Western Front has led to the nation-state undergoing a ” crisis of legitimacy” and the universal decline of the state argued by Martin van Creveld.

As the conflicts today are, in Lind’s view, organic cultural conflicts of clashing ( and fractionating) primary loyalties, a new grand strategy must be offered; a defensive posture that seeks to conserve ” centers of order” ( like China, America, Europe) and isolate ourselves from those centers of ” disorder”, including immigration by culturally indigestible groups like ” Islamics”. Lind also pointed to the need for an intellectual and moral regeneration at home and replacement of a self-serving, corrupt and politically inept bipartisan elite influenced by the tenets of cultural Marxism and political correctness ( interestingly, no one cared to argue the point about the incompetence of the elite though the cultural aspect was disputed).

Lind further dismissed any idea of the emergence of a 5th generation of war from consideration and, in response to a question, offered a ferociously bitter, ad hominem, attack on the ideas of Thomas P.M. Barnett as “a fairy tale”, fit for publication in ” a comic book”. Lind offered no specifics and my impression was that Lind has a visceral dislike of Dr. Barnett’s theories because their optimism and economic determinism sharply contradicts Lind’s deeply pessimistic, culturally-based, analysis.

TX Hammes, while admiring of Lind’s work, did not accept Lind’s “kultur uber alles” premise and pointed to traditional political-economic-military indicators as being sufficient analytical categories for 4GW and emerging 5GW. Frank Hoffman hammered hard at the theoretical weaknesses in 4GW theory, accusing the school of making use of ” selective history” and being elusive in its definitions – though Hoffman too blasted the ineptitude and blindness of the political and military establishment with much the same vehemence of Lind. In the seniors session, General Anthony Zinni, flatly repudiated Lind’s characterization of Muslim societies as myopic, being based upon the mythic rantings of Islamist radicals who were wholly unrepresentative of Muslims or mainstream Islam.

The Generals And the Major:

The senior session with General Paul Van Riper, the aforementioned General Zinni and General Alfred Gray are worth noting as was the seminar conducted by Major Don Vandergriff.

Van Riper called for a return to a “wide open intellectual climate” in the Marines and the military as a whole that ignored rank and focused upon the quality of ideas. An education of “how the world works” in terms of complex adaptive systems and the differences between those that were structurally complex and rigid and those that were interactively complex and fluid must be given and understood in order to confront ” wicked problems” effectively. The “Reductionist-Analytical” intellectual model can no longer be relied upon to provide answers, in Van Riper’s view.

Much of the rest of the time was taken by the generals answering Shane Deichman’s question of operational jointness and Goldwater-Nichols. Shane’s question was so good it basically hijacked the rest of the session as the generals offered their experiences and criticism of how “jointness” came to evolve in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Attaboy, Shane! ;o)

Vandergriff offered an outline in implementing the intellectual change Van Riper hopes to see come about with a forced practice method starting with ” Three Levels Above” that requires students to adapt and think in “free play” scenarios. Vandergriff boiled his educational theory down to the principles of:

1. Evolve the Course

2. Every moment offers an opportunity to develop adaptability

3. Student Ownership

4.Develop at three levels.

5. Outstanding teachers

Vandergriff’s ideas are centered in military education but their applicability is entirely societal and systemic.

Comments are welcomed, especially if you can fill in anything that I have missed or gotten wrong.