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My friend Bruce Kesler sent me a link to an article in David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld  and Alyssa Lappen from the American Center for Democracy , Frontpagemag is a conservative site which mostly concentrates on purely political and cultural battles with the Far Left, that had a very interesting title:

“The Fifth Generation Warfare”

The article is actually an excerpt from an academic study prepared by the U.S. Naval War College, Armed Groups: Studies in National Security, Counterterrorism, and Counterinsurgency and the section used is focused on financing of Islamist terrorism and related activities. For example:

FINANCIAL JIHAD

Funding the jihad, i.e., financial jihad, or Al Jihad bi-al-Mal, is mandated by many verses in the Qur’an, such as chapter 61, verses 10.11: “you . . . should strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives,” and chapter 49, verse 15: “The [true] believers are only those who . . . strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah.” This has been reiterated throughout Islamic history and in recent times. “Financial Jihad [is] . . . more important . . . than self-sacrificing,” according to Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood (MB) spiritual leader Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi.⁶

Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most prominent Sunni scholars in the world today, reiterated the legal justification for “financial jihad [Al-Jihad bi-al-Mal]” in a lecture he gave on 4 May 2002 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to him, “collecting money for the mujahideen (jihad fighters . . . ) was not a donation or a gift but a duty necessitated by the sacrifices they made for the Muslim nation.” ⁷

This is more or less in the vein of “Unrestricted Warfare” on the Chinese model but readers can read for themselves. What I find interesting is that the 4GW/5GW ideas and terminology that have been kicked around this corner of the blogosphere for the last four or five years are creeping in to mainstream use across the political spectrum as academics, journalists and politicos try to get a handle on the evolution of irregular warfare.

UPDATE:

A site called “Arabic Media Shack” emailed me today and pointed to this post by one of their bloggers “Grandmasta Splash” on perceptions of what is and what is not considered moderately conservative vs. extremist within the Muslim world. Later on, in an unrelated conversation, a source of great street cred gave Arabic Media Shack an unprompted personal endorsement. So, here they are.

Two review copies sent to me the other day both of which I will review over at Chicago Boyz sometime this summer.

But first, I owe a review to my esteemed collegeague Dan of tdaxp:

So many books….

Shloky’s right. Obama’s “national security working group” is designed to be safe, graybeardish and reassuringly vetted to avoid some embarrassing time bomb going off in the media down the road. Madeleine Albright is the edgiest figure in the group! You can almost hear Senator Obama saying, much like a used-car salesman, ” this foreign policy team was owned by a liberal Southern governor of a small rural state who only drove it on Sundays…”. How many of the somewhat conservative Democrats on this list will actually be offered a job come January if Obama wins?  Nunn and Hamilton were too conservative for the Clinton administration and Barack Obama is quite a bit left of old Bill.

The Starbuck’s sipping radicals in Yglesias’ comment section appear to be unhappy but for different reasons; evidently they expected the Obama campaign to have named Leon Trotskii and Che Guevara as advisers…

A part of a comment from Jay@Soob:

“This was likely compounded by the chronological assignment (that Mao was the first to conceptualize 4GW is an assertion that Ethan Allen might have something to swear and swing fists about)”

The frequent and casual association of Chairman Mao with 4GW is something that has always puzzled me as well ( though, if memory serves, William Lind was always careful to explain that 4GW isn’t simply guerilla warfare). I think it can be attributed to the likelihood that most people who are somewhat familiar with 4GW theory tend to think first of guerillas and Mao is regarded as a great innovator there. However, is there merit in placing Mao in the “4GW pantheon” (if there is such a thing)?

In the ” yes” column I’d offer the following observations:

Mao, whose actual positive leadership contribution to Communist victory in the civil war was primarily political and strategic rather than operational and tactical ( his military command decisions were often the cause of disaster, retreat and defeat for Communist armies) had a perfect genius – I think that word would be an accurate description here – for operating at the mental and moral levels of warfare.  Partly this was skillful playing of a weak hand on Mao’s part; the Communists were not a match on the battlefield for the better Nationalist divisions until the last year or so of the long civil war but Mao regularly outclassed Chiang Kai-shek in propaganda and diplomacy – turning military defeats at Chiang’s hands into moral victories and portraying Communist inaction in the face of Japanese invasion as revolutionary heroism. Yenan might have be a weird, totalitarian, nightmare fiefdom but Mao made certain that foreign journalists, emissaries and intelligence liasons reported fairy tales to the rest of the world.

In the “maybe” column:

Regardless of one’s opinion of Mao ZeDong, China’s civil war, running from the collapse of the Q’ing dynasty in 1911 to the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, is a historical laboratory for 4GW and COIN theory.  The complexity of China in this era was akin to that of Lebanon’s worst years in the 1980’s but it lasted for decades. In a given province of China ( many of which were as large or larger than major European nations) then there might have been operating simultaneously: several warlord armies, Communist guerillas,  Nationalist armies, the Green Gang syndicate, White Russian mercenaries, Mongol Bannermen, rival Kuomintang factions, common bandit groups and military forces of European states, Japan and the United States. Disorder and ever-shifting alliances and fighting was the norm and Mao was the ultimate victor in this era.

In the “no ” column:

Mao ZeDong, whatever his contributions to the art of guerilla warfare, intended, quite firmly, to build a strong state in China, albeit a Communist one in his own image. He was never interested in carving out a sphere of influence or an autonomous zone in China except as a stepping stone to final victory. Moreover, the Red Army’s lack of conventional fighting ability for most of the civil war related to a lack of means, not motive on Mao’s part. When material was available, particularly after 1945, when Stalin turned over equipment from the defeated  Kwangtung army and began supplying a more generous amount of Soviet military aid to the Chinese Communists, Mao tried to shift to conventional warfare. When in power, he sent the PLA’s 5-6 crack divisions into the Korean War to face American troops in 2GW-style attrition warfare, not guerilla infiltrators behind MacArthur’s lines. 

Finally, Mao’s personal political philosophy of governance, taken from Marxism-Leninism and Qin dynasty Legalism, are about as radically hierarchical and alien to 4GW thinking as it is possible to be.

In sum, Mao is and should be regarded as a major figure in the  history of the 20th century and that century’s military history but he isn’t the grandfather of fourth generation warfare.

ADDENDUM:

Congratulations to 4GW theorist and blogger Fabius Maximus for being picked up by the BBC.

Recently, I posted on articles in Democracy Journal.org which I referred to as an “e-zine”. Ethan Porter of DJ wrote in to point out to me that Democracy Journal is a full-fledged, dead-tree, magazine available at Barnes & Noble and other retailers.

It is also a new publication and one of the very few policy mags to give an opening to writers in the COIN/4GW area so if you enjoyed the pieces by Exum and Hammes, show some love and pick up a copy of Democracy Journal in the future.