COIN may be Dead but 4GW has a New Lease on Life
As I had predicted, a global recession, budgetary chicken in Congress and national weariness after a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced a public rethink of the prominence of counterinsurgency doctrine in America’s military kit. Colonel Gian Gentile, long the intellectual archenemy of FM 3-24 and the “Surge narrative” has pronounced COIN “dead” and even CNAS, spiritual home of COIN theory inside the Beltway, is now advocating COIN-lite FID (Foreign Internal Defense). As this entire process is being driven by a global economic crisis, there is another aspect to this American inside-baseball policy story.
While COIN as the hyperexpensive, nation-building, FM 3-24 pop-centric version of counterinsurgency is fading away, irregular warfare and terrorism are here to stay as long as there is human conflict. Moreover, as economic systems are to nation-states as vascular systems are to living beings, we can expect an acceleration of state failure as weak but functional states are forced by decreased revenues to reduce services and diminish their ability to provide security or enforce their laws. The global “habitat” for non-state, transanational and corporate actors is going to grow larger and the zones of civilized order will shrink and come under internal stress in the medium term even in the region that Thomas P.M. Barnett defined as the “Core” of globalization.
The theory of Fourth Generation Warfare is helpful here. Many people in the defense community object to 4GW thinking, arguing that it is a poor historical model because it is overly simplified, the strategic ideas typified by each generation are cherrypicked and are usually present in many historical eras (albeit with much different technology). For example, eminent Clausewitzian strategist Colin Gray writes of 4GW in Another Bloody Century:
….The theory of Fourth Generation Warfare or 4GW merits extended critical attention here for several reasons. It appears to be a very big idea indeed. It’s author [ William S. Lind] and his followers profess to be able to explain how and why warfare has evolved over the past 350 years and onto the future….
….Talented and intellectually brave strategic theorists are in such short supply that I hesitate before drawing a bead on Lind and his grand narrative of succeeding generations of warfare. Nonetheless, there is no avoiding the judgment that 4GW is the rediscovery of the obvious and the familiar.
4GW theory is not something that can be defended as having sound historical methodology. However, it works well enough as a strategic taxonomy of mindsets and political environments in which war is waged; particularly with the inclusion of the van Creveldian assumptions of state decline, it is a useful tool for looking at warfare in regions of weak, failing and failed states. The same global region Dr. Barnett has termed “the Gap” in his first book, The Pentagon’s New Map.
Tom predicated his geostrategy on the power of globalization being harnessed with judicious use of Core military power to “shrink the Gap” and provide connectivity as an extremely powerful lever to raise up billions of the world’s poor into a more stable, freer and middle-class existence. While that still holds, the flipside is that times of sharp economic contraction limit the ability of the Core, led by the United States, to intervene robustly, permitting the “bad guys” to make use of connectivity and black globalization for their own purposes. Where the great powers are disunited, disinterested or increasingly in the case of European power projection, disarmed, the Gap could potentially grow.
A new Iraq or Afghanistan sized campaign is not in the American defense budget for at least a decade. Or NATO’s. Hence the newfound interest in cheaper alternatives to massive intervention on the ground, for which the Libyan campaign might charitably be classed as an “experiment” ( where it was not simply bad strategy and negotiated operations) or as a multilateral reprise of Rumsfeldian ideas of transformative, light and fast military force mashed up with Reagan Doctrine proxy warfare, justified under a new ideological theory of R2P.
These are rational policy responses to conditions of parsimony, but it also indicates a coming era of strategic triage rather than grand crusades in using military force to stabilize parts of the global system. The US and other great power are going to be more likely to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice to “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have” than they are to heed JFK’s call “to pay any price, bear any burden”. The politics of hard times means that we will be minimizing our burdens by replacing, where we can, boots with bots, bullets with bytes and Marines with mercs. Not everywhere, but certainly on the margins of American interests.
Beyond those margins? We will aid and trade with whatever clients can maintain a vestige of civilized order without too much regard to the niceties of formal state legitimacy. Too many states will be ceding autonomy to subnational and transnational entities on their territory in the next few decades and we will have to abide by that reality if regions of the world become Somalia writ large. What to do? A number of recommendations come to mind:
- Get our own economic house in order with greater degrees of transparency and adherence to rule of law in our financial sector. Legitimacy and stability, like charity, begins at home.
- Adopt policies that strengthen the principle of national sovereignty and enhance legitimacy rather than weaken or erode it. This does not mean respecting hollow shells of fake states that are centers of disorder, but respecting legitimate ones that effectively govern their territory
- Foreign policies that reject oligarchical economic arrangements in favor of encouraging liberalization of authoritarian-autarkic state economies prior to enacting political reforms ( democracy works better the first time on a full stomach).
- Create a grand strategy board to advise senior policy makers and improve the currently abysmal level of strategic calculation and assessment prior to the US assuming open-ended commitments to intervention
- Accept that the Laws of War require a realistic updating to deal with the international equivalent of outlaws, an updating that contradicts and rejects the 1970’s era diplomatic effort to privilege irregular combatants over conventional forces.
- Fighting foreign insurgencies is something best done by primarily by locals, if willing, with our aid and advice. If those with the most to lose are not willing to stand, fight and die then they deserve to lose and the US should either eschew getting involved at all or resolve to secure whatever vital interest that exists there by brute force and make certain that reality is clearly communicated to the world (i.e. Carter Doctrine). Truly vital interests are rare.
December 12th, 2011 at 5:06 pm
zen-
I think it important to note that Gray rejects 4GW in the book you quote from. The next sentence reads:
For reasons that sociologists and accountants may be able to explain, defense professionals, military and civilian, have a record of rallying to the latest slogans and buzzwords that masquerade as profound thought. . .
Going from COIN (which following Galula is proper strategic theory and Clausewitzian to boot) to 4GW is regressive, avoiding what should be the lesson of the last few years . . .
Wars take place within a political context, are in fact struggles between opposing political communities. COIN isn’t really dead, but 4GW is.
December 12th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
hi Seydlitz,
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Gray does reject 4GW (and many other concepts in Another Bloody Century) which is why I used him as an example of a critic.
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I agree that wars take place in a political context. Sometimes the political communities are not in opposition but are a single community in the process of fracturing into two or more. A frequent driver of such events, though hardly the only factor, are diverging economic interests. Money and resources, or lack thereof or fair division thereof can alienate members of a political community to the point where they begin to see themselves as having a separate identity and take up arms. If there are other intra-community political conflicts, they can be aggravated or ameliorated by changes in economic conditions. We are going to be seeing more of this in the next decade or two.
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Some ppl see 4GW as a universal theory. I don’t, but it has utility as a lens in some scenarios and where it doesn’t, I use something else. Sometimes Galula is the right model to use for understanding the dynamics of an insurgency and at other times the irregulars are quite dissimilar in worldview and strategic objectives from what he saw in Algeria
December 12th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Zen-
Civil wars are still political. It is after all the political questions that can divide the community in question. I think it comes down to how one defines politics. Clausewitzians have a broad definition, as did van Creveld when he wrote The Eternal Clausewitz . . .
December 12th, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Good post Zen, a lot here.
Off topic but for a good read for anyone interested, “Shattered Sword” The Untold Story of The Battle of Midway
December 12th, 2011 at 11:21 pm
Nice post Zen! A great deal to think about.
December 13th, 2011 at 12:26 am
zen-
Sorry if that came a bit hard ;-)>, but being a Clausewitzian, my first impulse has become over time to “gut” any 4GW theory in the room. A sign of the times.
December 13th, 2011 at 4:20 am
At this rate of defrosting strategic myths as hoary as convenience store hot dogs, we’ll be talking about Douhetian airpower by February, Mahanian decisive battle at sea by March, Jominian annihilation of the enemy in decisive battle by June, and the superiority of Folsom points over Clovis points by this time next year.
I for one welcome our new Stone Age overlords.
December 13th, 2011 at 5:37 am
No worries. Theory cannot be gutted; only refuted where it does not work. Most strategic theories that gained any traction in military thought ( or less than theory concepts and strategems) have or had an original point of application in time where they were useful, beyond which they make progressively less sense and can conceivably do positive harm if employed.
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Pass me a few Clovis points 🙂
December 13th, 2011 at 11:49 am
zen-
Agree when the theories are based on actual military/strategic history, but not when the “theories” are simply longwinded speculation (what Svechin refers to as “charlatanism”) . . . in that case they more reflect the confusion and obsessions of the time in question. Theories are like spectacles, if they aid your vision, enable you to focus on the main points, then fine, but if they blur or hide things you should be seeing . . . you’re better off without them.
December 14th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Mark,
Realize I’m a day or two late here, but visiting the house of the mouse with grandkids last week. Great post and a thought I hope you may continue with periodicaslly. I’m hopefully going to follow this up with an e-mail since I’m multi articles into history here, but couple of thoughts:
The criticism of 4GW (and I think i’ve read most) is to me extremely flawed in that it all appears based in “not crossing “t’s, dotting “i’s” in regard to history in academic sense. Heaven friggin forbid that someone could offer up a description thar defines occurences that are going on today and are not adequately addressed by current terms. Hammes book was great but flawed when he equated 4GW with insuregency. “Guerrilla,” “insurgency,” irregular warfare – none describe the mess that we have with mix of war, crime, insurgency, terrorism across the globe. Unless your definition includes events on our Southern border then your model is flawed. And Von C covered this???
On Sept 12th 2001 we “did what we know”… we went to war. Anybody happy with that story?
Had 4GW been a lens for contemplation in the decision process, things might have been different…we might have had some clue about “knowing what to do.”
Thinking on 4GW needs to get beyonf “Book, 2, Chater 5, paragragh 6.7, Psalm 40” of On War and look past the fact that it was never intended for the history prof in an ivory tower. The vey best counter was by Col Eric Walters on SWJ, if you recall you contributed very nicely. I copied all of his work on Boyd, Maneuver Warfare and 4GW. It’s quite a read and reall would be worth publishing somewhere.
Again, great post and point on.
December 14th, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Since the bar that theory has to clear is now so low that not crossing i’s, dotting t’s, and wildly mischaracterizing military history for the last 1/2 millenium is a rounding error, I propose that we view today’s conflicts through the lens of the game theory laid out by noted game designers strategic theorists Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in their seminal 1979 game-playing manual work of strategic theory Dungeons and Dragons. Its portrayal of European combat from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West until Maurice of Nassau has some interpretive inaccuracies like wizards, elves, and the occasional fire-breathing dragon but it offers up a description of what’s hip, happening, and now in today’s complicated world. The characters are armed with pointy things that they periodically wave at other things that they encounter which may or may not be armed with their own pointy thing. Some even have “range attacks” which can strike opponents without even closing to spear length. It’s all unpredictable, which is just the sort of framework we need to wander around an anarchic world populated with decentralized soldiers, paladins, and mages who answer to no one except generational commands and maybe the Dungeon Master.
December 14th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Hi Ed-
You commented:
The criticism of 4GW (and I think i’ve read most) is to me extremely flawed in that it all appears based in “not crossing “t’s, dotting “i’s” in regard to history in academic sense.
The criticism that I’m familiar with goes much further than that . . .
In the introduction to Professor Echevarria’s critique of 4GW the Director of the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute writes:
In an era of broad and perhaps profound change, new theories and concepts are to be welcomed rather than shunned. However, before they are fully embraced, they need to be tested rigorously, for the cost of implementing a false theory and developing operational and strategic concepts around it can be greater than remaining wedded to an older, but sounder one. The theory of Fourth Generation War (4GW) is a perfect example. Were we to embrace this theory, a loose collection of ideas that does not hold up to close scrutiny, the price we might pay in a future conflict could be high indeed.
In this monograph, Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II provides a critique of the theory of 4GW, examining its faulty assumptions and the problems in its logic. He argues that the proponents of 4GW undermine their own credibility by subscribing to this bankrupt theory. If their aim is truly to create positive change, then they— and we—would be better off jettisoning the theory and retaining the traditional concept of insurgency, while modifying it to include the greater mobility and access afforded by globilization.
No the criticism goes straight to the basics . . . I still have the original 4GW article from my own copy of the Marine Corps Gazette from 1989 and it was all about speculation, not theory, or even an attempt at theory. That only came later with van Creveld’s The Transformation of War (TTW) in 1991. The problem here is that Van C is all over the place, having written the Eternal Clausewitz six years before, which means essentially one can use van C to counter van C. TTW has so many problems that I have addressed before.
The basic 4GW approach though is tactical, not dealing with strategy at all. I had an email exchange with van C about this very subject, btw. TTW is the strategy part whereas 4GW is the tactical, so the emphasis is exclusively on tactics with the “vague anthropology” of TTW providing the strategic component. But then van C rejects “axiomatic theory” so where does that leave 4GW? I never got an answer to that question, but neither did I need one. If you wish to know the reason for what Gian Gentile has referred to as the strategy of tactics you need look no further than 4GW . . .
I also find it ironic that you mention “Psalm 40” in connection with Clausewitz, since it is 4GW that believes it is reflecting actual reality (although no one actually knows what it is, only has faith that 4GW itself does exist . . .) whereas for Clausewitzians strategic theory (which cannot be used to predict events) is simply a set of interlocking strategic concepts (speaking of Clausewitz’s general theory here) used to assist in understanding strategic reality, that is theory not a reified concept.
As to Clausewitzian advice following 9/11, what about Sir Michael Howard? Is he good enough? Not that anybody listened . . .
As to Mexico today, consider the political relations between the political communities involved, and perhaps don’t be so quick to declare what you see as “war” let alone 4GW . . . maybe then we can start to learn from our mistakes.
December 14th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
JF, you miss the point entirely. 4GW as introduced was NOT intended for history analysis or historians. Do you deny that the 4 contexts actually exist? They speak to tactics, command control and technology, and the first three give context to try and understand an environment unlike any we’ve seen. And please, guerrilla warfare in the past is not what we’ve seen world wide nor does it include the crime war blend of the drug violence. Here is an excerpt from Col Walters writing:
“Most of the criticism about 4GW revolves around it’s extremely shaky foundations as a theoretical construct, an analytical lens, or any number of uses as tool for understanding military history. Okay, ALL OF THESE CRITICISMS ARE VALID. But the 4GW characterization was never intended for the uses that so many appear to attribute to it…
4GW was still a label to describe a condition. It wasn’t intended for the historians. It wasn’t created for the defense analysts. It wasn’t meant for the academics. It was for the field Marines who needed a shorthand term to describe the Cartels, the Somalia clans, the warring tribes and families, etc. To basically mean that pure military force wasn’t going work against these characters. In that sense this bumper sticker label still works, even though the numbering system is misleading and the idea of “generations” just doesn’t hold throughout under any serious historical investigation or analysis. Remember, this is the Marine Corps. “It’s easy to be hard, and hard to be smart.” And the corollary: “I’m not smart, and you can’t make me.” I’ll just leave it at that. I’m not defending it, but I’m explaining it.
So, the bottom line up front for you non-jarhead types: This was never intended for you. Not really. Not originally.
Of course, the proponents–Bill Lind among them–were only too happy to see this particular genie escape the lamp and cause all kinds of debate and rhetorical havoc. And I think it’s been a good thing for all the reasons we’ve seen in other threads about MW. People have to ask questions and defend their points of view…and constantly rethink their assumptions.
This is no doubt a gross summary/oversimplification of nearly twenty years of serious thought and discussion…”
December 15th, 2011 at 5:59 am
Ed:
We lurch blindly into the future with only the past to guide us. History (at its best) is the art of digesting that past.
Over time, the history of the specialist is violently whittled down to a few historical rules of thumb for the practitioner. What is a rule of thumb? A prophecy drawn from distilled history. Practical folks expect to follow a rule of thumb and have step 1 lead inevitably to step 2. For most people, history is nothing more than the father of checklists. As Otto von Bismarck is supposed to have observed, “Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.”
The historical specialist will quibble with a historical rule of thumb like “don’t fight a land war in Asia” by pointing out how many land wars have been fought and won in Asia but for most practitioners most of the time “don’t fight a land war in Asia” is good enough to guide actions.
Fourth-generation warfare is such bad history that the rules of thumb derived from it are horrifically flawed. Your jarheads could call the various armed strangers with ambiguous motives they meet at home and abroad One-eyed, One-horned, Flying, Purple People Eaters and it would have provide just as much individual clarity as the amorphous critter that is fourth-generation warfare.
Fourth-generation warfare is bad history and bad prophecy. A practical man doesn’t build his efforts on a foundation of fantasy. If he’s determined to anyway, one fantasy is as good as another and there’s a role-playing game that he can buy on Amazon that’s just as good as the fourth-generation warfare corpus to guide his efforts. The pictures are much better and you can share it with the kids.
December 15th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
JF:
“We lurch blindly into the future with only the past to guide us.” And so on Sept 12, 2001 we followed WWI, WWII, CW and went to war??? Somehow there’s got to be more than history PHDs.
“Fourth-generation warfare is such bad history that the rules of thumb derived from it are horrifically flawed.” Interesting the level of use the USMC has made of this (and must be seen in context of the Marines seeing themselves as a “maneuver warfare force”). Look, a significant portion of the 3GW/4GW dialogue must be seen as Army vs. Marine Corps. For every Army Col you throw out, I can throw up a USMC Col. The why and starting point of the 4GW evolution is critical. Walters’comments on SWJ run 50+ pages (Zen contributed) and interestingly enough, the Army guys by-and-large just stopped commenting. Zen offered an intellectual challenge, which far as I know they ignored. The history argument while valid strictly speaking as Col Walters acknowledges is almost irrelevant. The tactics, technology, and C2 of Waterloo, Gettsyburg, WWI trenches, and Guderian/Patton are different and evolved based on technical capability. The problems of Somalia, etc, etc are not linear from the above – new construct needed and Lind, GI Wilson, et al created a first cut and got the ball rolling.
seydlitz89:
Moving to your comments, Echevarria seems to take supreme issue with the fact that the original concept evolved after more people got involved, as if they were playing bait and switch. Adding, sutracting, modifying ideas was the way I thought it was supposed to work, no? As to his critique, I found it odd then and find it odd now. He put words in people’s mouths and mixed an awful lot of stuff – some good, I admit – that just seemed way out of context. I talked to Chet Richards after this came out, and Chet’s comments were that Echevarria was so far from the center of the 4GW context that it was hard to even address. and OBTW, what Echevarria discusses is 4GW as “super insurgency” – the Hammes view. As I recall, Lind took severe exception to the second part of Sling and the Stone as not what 4GW was intended to represent.
As to the Howard piece: Seems to me he makes the 4GW point rather than counters it. I repeat, we had absolutely no construct/lens for viewing the worldwide threat environment on Sept 12, 2001. We did what history told us. We did what we knew. Flawed as some of the 4GW “generation” labels are… oh well, we are not going to agree here.
December 15th, 2011 at 7:29 pm
Ed Beakley,
That is really interesting about Lind not agreeing with Hammes about Super Insurgency not really being 4GW. I never new that but suspected that from his writings. Also from my days of going through Slap’s One Minute Guerrilla Warfare course we were taught alot about social forces. Today this is being called Non-Violent Struggle (you could just as well call it 4GW IMO)but the Commies from the 50’s and 60’s were very familiar with it.
December 15th, 2011 at 7:35 pm
You guys may want to take a look at this paper by Gene Sharp. It is called “The Role Of Power In Nonviolent Struggle” Link is provided below and you can download it for free. Has a lot of 4GW concepts IMO.
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationse4f0.html
December 15th, 2011 at 10:33 pm
Ed-
You commented:
Adding, sutracting, modifying ideas was the way I thought it was supposed to work, no?
Depends on what we’re talking about. What you are saying sounds reasonable, but in reality there is a BIG distinction between simple speculation however believable and formulated theory. If you can learn a “theory” in an afternoon as one can with 4GW there’s probably something flawed about it. Theory isn’t meant to be easy, if it were it wouldn’t be that difficult to formulate a general theory of war/strategy. How many are there anyhow?
One, or two if you wish to go it alone with Sun Tzu.
Which means when you decide to toss a general theory overboard, perhaps you ought to think it through and consider what exactly it is you’re doing. Martin van C came out with TTW, I read it, considered his argument, rejected it, commented on it, and have moved on.
Have you read TTW? I would have no idea of knowing. Have you read On War, again no way of knowing . . . your take on actual theory isn’t very clear . .
December 16th, 2011 at 12:25 am
“I repeat, we had absolutely no construct/lens for viewing the worldwide threat environment on Sept 12, 2001.”
Odd. Anyone who’d read the works of Clausewitz, Tom Clancy, Austin Bay, or James Dunnigan before that date already had a lens. Even the concept of hitting major U.S. targets with a plane was a key plot device of Clancy’s 1994 novel Debt of Honor, which is the first thing I thought when the second plane hit the second tower. The deliberate spread of biological weapons by terrorists through the U.S. was the subject of its sequel, 1996’s Executive Orders.
As for fighting irregulars all over the world, the broad strategies of of population control and human domestication have remained constant since the dawn of history. You establish a grid and you tighten the squares on the grid until the population is squeezed into control. This control can be achieved by “wilfing” resisting members of the population with violence, “nagling” them with influence, or, as is historically normal, some mixture of wilfing and nagling. Even if it was valid, fourth-generation warfare is a culture-specific play that assumes dispersed irregulars will fight a state opponent who 1) cares about post-1960s Western norms 2) can be shaken by bad imagery that affects the opinion of some public the state opponent cares about paying attention to 3) cannot simply totally wilf the irregulars and their host population, leaving a desert and calling it peace. Those conditions apply to the culture of Western Europe and the United States from 1965 till now but they are not guaranteed to apply to anyone else or even the West in all times and in all places. Unless fourth-generation warfare is a clever Marine ploy to convince the U.S. Army that day is night and night is day, allowing the Marines to win the one war they fight with unbridled passion, it is and remains a useless framework for analyzing anything more complicated than kids with spray paint tagging Lind’s car with graffiti.
December 16th, 2011 at 4:25 am
“This control can be achieved by “wilfing” resisting members of the population with violence, “nagling” them with influence, or, as is historically normal, some mixture of wilfing and nagling”
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This sentence is genius even if the rest is overwrought.
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4GW is not a general theory of war, or if William Lind were to assert it to be so, I am not obligated to use 4GW that way anymore than Colonel Hammes was obligated not to redefine it as ” an evolved form of super-insurgency” for his purposes. There are redically decentralized, many-sided, insurgencies in the world that do not conform to the tightly hierarchical, three stage, Maoist model and the response of some Clausewitzians to declare them, therefore, to be “not insurgencies” is circular sophistry worthy of 12th century theologians.
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Nor does it matter if, as van Creveld declared ” the state everywhere is in decline” or not as a universal phenomenon. That the state is in sharp decline (or was never really established in the first place) in many places with some social black holes of total collapse, makes the concept useful when we emprically see a state begin to rapidly decay. I don’t need 4GW to stretch to include nuclear deterrence, or maritime strategy or to define the number of guerrillas who can dance on the head of a grenade pin or to “replace” Clausewitzian strategy or to be a meta-theory of historical development. 4GW simply needs to be “good enough” for the analytical task at hand, alone or in conjunction with some other cognitive tool.
December 16th, 2011 at 6:16 am
In the original Lind article, fourth-generation warfare was offered as a teleology of how tactical configurations have evolved during the modern (post-1500) age and what they were evolving towards. Hence the “4”, the “G”, and the “W”. Somewhere in the last twenty years, fourth-generation warfare became wrapped up in van Creveld’s teleology of how the Westphalian state is in terminal decline and Lind’s fourth-generation became tied up with the end of the nation-state as it has supposedly been since 1648. Each point in fourth-generation warfare 1.0 can be contested both as a description of how warfare evolved before 1990 and how it has evolved since 1990. Each point in fourth-generation warfare 2.0 (van Creveld edition) can be contested both as a critique of how social aggregations and the violence they spew evolved prior to 1990 and how they have evolved since 1990. Even if fourth-generation warfare is applied narrowly as an interpretive framework for dissecting the violent interactions of classical states and the non-state actors that don’t love them, it still doesn’t have much illustrative power compared to other analytical frameworks whether they’re meta-historical in ambition or not. Stripping fourth-generation warfare of its flawed historical teleology leaves you with a 4 and a G and a W that lack a connection to any outside context. Like 5GW, when you lose the words your abbreviating you are left with nothing but three letters, vague assertions that could describe 90% of human conflict, and a giant intellectual black hole that’s sucking up thought cycles that would be better spent developing new analytical frameworks without the baggage of dead Germans, dead Chinese leaders, or living cultists.
December 16th, 2011 at 10:38 am
To what Joseph has clearly laid out I would only add that 4GW isn’t just about a flawed theory/approach, it is much more imo about what it attempts to trash. We have a generation of people interested in military affairs who unquestioning mimic van C and Lind in their approach/attempt to (mis)understand Clausewitz. This was the same situation we had in late 50s-60s due to the writings of Liddell Hart.
Yet Clausewitz is still around, and doing surprisingly well, in spite of all Lind’s inane talk of the “temple” and van C’s ramshackle “Trinitarian War” notion. This due to the simple fact that Clausewitz’s general theory of war works adequately well as strategic theory. Is it any wonder though that we are no closer to JC Wiley’s dream of a general theory of strategy than we were in 1967?
December 16th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Mark
Excellent comment. To criticize a concept because it is not perfect out of the box, or useful for all things in all times, or dosen’t need thinking, refinement change, flys against everything I’ve ever been taught. I went back and looked through my “4GW library,” and the concept created huge debate. I find it hard to believe that was not useful for those who had to figure out the mess after 9-11 – particularly those who had to send out those who walked the streets. We adapted, yes, but way to slowly. We rejected lessons learned of insurgency from Vietnam. Given our history of stove pipe mentality, we’ll probably do the same again. 4GW was a stick that stirred the pot… “destruction and creation” no?
JF, seydlitz89:
I’ll be blunt here. To me you represent the poster children out of Boyd’s Destruction and Creation – no matter how things change make the events fit the theory??? 4GW coming out of Bill Lind’s house and long term dialogue with real warfighters with real skin in the game was an attempt to understand a world where terrorism, insurgency, radical religous thinking, blending with criminal activity, people who were far from conventional warriors, who might or might not have state funding, who were not concerned with norms of warfare such as the Geneva Convention and out of that what could only be fuzzy actionable understanding, create a process for carrying out what their country put on their plate.
JF, you state their are other and better models. What where, and why weren’t they used September 12th 2001? Why did it take so long for the COIN manual? Why did it create such disagreement? What now?
I said this on my site a long time ago and I say it now the day after we leave Iraq: “On the last day of the last soldier in Iraq, it will just be one more day for those who practice under the umbrella of 4GW.” We cannot ignore this, no matter the label.
I’ll close this with a link to something I put up hurriedly last week. The commission that addressed Pearl Harbor identified 25 failures, all linked to men not technolgy. Those 25 failures existed on 9-11, they existed for Katrina response and they exist today. They exist because people won’t get out of the box, requiring too many “i’s” and “t’s” to be crossed to pass muster. http://blog.projectwhitehorse.com/2011/12/december-7-1941-a-failure-of-men/
December 16th, 2011 at 10:25 pm
“They exist because people won’t get out of the box…” It’s not out of the box, but outside the wire. Inside the wire is an orientation–outside is a generation of diversity.
December 16th, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Ed-
You’re all over the place . . . I still have no idea if you’ve actually read van C or On War . . . You commented:
As to the Howard piece: Seems to me he makes the 4GW point rather than counters it. I repeat, we had absolutely no construct/lens for viewing the worldwide threat environment on Sept 12, 2001.
then you commented:
I’ll be blunt here. To me you represent the poster children out of Boyd’s Destruction and Creation – no matter how things change make the events fit the theory???
Did you notice that was exactly what you did with Howard? Probably not.
Here’s the full speech made on Halloween night 2001 . . . a much better lens than the one used, or yours, and a Clausewitzian one to boot, but instead of talking about this and maybe, just maybe, learning something, you just want to call us names.
Group think Ed. I checked out PWH. Nice website and blog, nicer than mine, but you’re the only one posting on 4GW and Boyd, so I don’t think you’re used to hearing contrary views, or? Joseph btw has written some very good stuff on Boyd, so why would you go after him?
You didn’t really handle this one very well, but maybe next time, you’ll do better . . . you just need to get outside your box.
December 16th, 2011 at 11:47 pm
seydlitz89,
Your comments lose me. I have read much of On War. What’s the point. I’m not anti-Clauswitz and never implied that. I did say the combo of players listed above requires looking beyond Clausewitz. I do take exception to the Clausewitz club that demands genuflection for any theory that doesn’t show proper respect.
Howard??? I agree with his comments. Again I ask, Why did we do what we did on Sept 12th. What models did our decision makers use? They used the remnants of the Cold War… “what we know”… go to war. Howard obviously had a different model. If it was Clausewitz, fine or influenced by Clausewitz, again fine. As Zen noted, the 4GW model should have been enough to see the complexity generated by the mix I mentioned before and maybe given some pause for reflection. You have placed 4GW in one days worth reading and rejected. Ok, but there is a lot of work – much on Chet richards’ old site by an awful lot of smart people and warfare experienced people attempting to refine the 4GW construct and create something warfighters could use. You and JF(in particular) seem to trivialize that effort. OBTW that includes some very senior Marines.
As to JF, you are right he has written very good stuff on Boyd, have read much of his work. Why “go after him” as you say? Same thing, his thoughts here are so closed he completely bypasses what some very smart/experienced folks have done. (Not referring to me) His reflection is captured by the pithy words of “one-eyed-one-horned-purple people eaters,” Dungeons and Dragons and spray painting Lind’s car.
My bottom line, we can make the same mistakes again. The 4GW players and environment is still out there. Rename it, grow it, whatever. As Col Walters said, it was never intended as a history of war, so attacking that piece??? All models are flawed, some are useful. A lot of serious people found it useful.
December 18th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
Ed-
Howard??? I agree with his comments. Again I ask, Why did we do what we did on Sept 12th. What models did our decision makers use? They used the remnants of the Cold War… “what we know”… go to war. Howard obviously had a different model. If it was Clausewitz, fine or influenced by Clausewitz, again fine. As Zen noted, the 4GW model should have been enough to see the complexity generated by the mix I mentioned before and maybe given some pause for reflection. You have placed 4GW in one days worth reading and rejected. Ok, but there is a lot of work – much on Chet richards’ old site by an awful lot of smart people and warfare experienced people attempting to refine the 4GW construct and create something warfighters could use. You and JF(in particular) seem to trivialize that effort. OBTW that includes some very senior Marines.
Why not cut to the chase? This is exactly what separates strategic theory from your 4GW. From our perspective a model for decision making at the strategic, actually grand strategic level is not possible. The complexities of two or more political communities operating in time in a violent adversarial relationship with a multitude of what Dietrich Dörner calls “levels of detail” is simply too complex to model and use as any sort of “prediction machine”. I would add that you simply will always have big gaps in your knowledge of specific critical variables and since we are dealing with humans and especially adversarial political communities (the whole range of social action theory actually), cultural assumptions on both sides will create unforeseen frictions as well. So, imo going with such a decision model in planning national strategy is a mug’s game and an indication of ultimate failure unless possibly the political stakes are quite low. Or to simply repeat Svechin’s view since he dealt with the same thing in the Red Army of his day, Charlatanism.
This is not to say that decision models can’t be used at the individual or even tactical level, which is where I’ve argued that Boyd, but not 4GW, is compatible within a Clausewitzian framework. This in turn brings up another point where we disagree. By rejecting Clausewitz, or simply parroting Lind’s temple slurs, one rejects a whole body of Clausewitzian thought that extends and expands the general theory. We take theory very seriously because it deals with a very serious subject and expect the formation of theory to be rigorous and open to critique as well. Also theory is a Gestalt which means that concepts can’t simply be wrenched out of context and applied here or there at whim, not without losing what the original concept was meant to indicate.
I tell my students to think of strategic theory as a language in which we can communicate clearly with others. There are rules of grammar and usage that we must follow or we risk not being understood. This does not mean we have to agree, in fact disagreement is welcome, but you need to structure your argument in terms of the language, so that we are operating with the same assumptions (which can of course be questioned) and with the same concepts and context as well. If we use the analogy of language to understand strategic theory we also see how the very structure of language/strategic theory influences how we think as well. Essentially strategic theory is a way of thinking, not what to think.
My initial take on 4GW wasn’t unfavorable. I read the article in 1989 while on active service in US overt strategic Humint collection. It was meant as speculation clearly, and I took it at that. With TTW in 1991 though it went through a big change and became something of a monster, actually attacking the assumptions behind strategic theory as a whole, so we were obligated to respond. I would add that arguing for a strategic decision model in terms of 4GW (where TTW provides what passes for the strategic element) is a blatant contradiction, since van C rejects descriptive, let alone prescriptive theory. But since you seemingly deal with concepts but with little context as to their origins I guess it’s possible in a doublethink sort of way.
Finally as to Sir Michael, he’s well worth a careful read since he spells out what are essentially the Clausewitzian assumptions in terms of what is war, what distinguishes it from other social activity, not to mention the whole essentially tragic nature of human action . . . a real breathe of fresh air after all the blind positivism that permeates much of what passes for commentary today.
December 18th, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Ah, this thread has run far, far away from me in my absence.
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“This is exactly what separates strategic theory from your 4GW. From our perspective a model for decision making at the strategic, actually grand strategic level is not possible. The complexities of two or more political communities operating in time in a violent adversarial relationship with a multitude of what Dietrich Dörner calls “levels of detail” is simply too complex to model and use as any sort of “prediction machine”.
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Seydlitz, how are you using the term “predictive” here?
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Kind of like what is meant by “political”, this is an important point for clarification.
December 18th, 2011 at 11:20 pm
zen-
It’s been a fun ride.
Context was Ed’s comment, his paragraph I added introducing my previous comment.
He’s talking about a strategic decision model. How is that not going to be predictive since as you admit you have’t clarified the “political” . . . ?
A nice reason to have a Clausewitzian around, just to point that out . . . ;-)>