The fallacies concerning 21st Century 4th Generation War (Terrorism)

[Caelius]

A very interesting read for anyone who goes all the way through.

In many ways I believe the report paints a valid picture as to why Global Terrorism is ultimately unsustainable. He makes the argument that as much as Terrorism, Guerilla Wars, and Insurgency are all heralded as unconventional means to war. They are also expanded irregular facets to otherwise regular conflict. Subsequently they can be neutralized by the nation state in forcing them to play on it's terms through incapacitating the conventional support bases that prop up their infrastructure, and I think it has an important correlation to the strategic aims of the US regarding them in the Global War on Terror and in Iraq.

Source

Here are some of the quotes I found to be most noteworthy.

Fourth Generation War (4GW) emerged in the late 1980s, but has become popular due to recent twists in the war in Iraq and terrorist attacks worldwide. Despite reinventing itself several times, the theory has several fundamental flaws that need to be exposed before they can cause harm to U.S. operational and strategic thinking. A critique of 4GW is both fortuitous and important because it also provides us an opportunity to attack other unfounded assumptions that could influence U.S. strategy and military doctrine.

In brief, the theory holds that modern warfare has evolved through four generations: 1) the use of massed manpower, 2) firepower, 3) maneuver, and now 4) an evolved form of insurgency that employs all available networks—political, economic, social, military—to convince an opponent’s decisionmakers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly.

What we are really seeing in the war on terror, and the campaign in Iraq and elsewhere, is that the increased “dispersion and democratization of technology, information, and finance” brought about by globalization has given terrorist groups greater mobility and access worldwide. At this point, globalization seems to aid the nonstate actor more than the state, but states still play a central role in the support or defeat of terrorist groups or insurgencies.

In late 2001, 4GW was reinvented again when one of the theory’s principal proponents proclaimed that September 11, 2001 (9/11), was “Fourth-Generation Warfare’s First Blow.”30 This claim was both clever—in that it exploited a moment of strategic surprise for the United States—and supremely arrogant, revealing the extent to which 4GW theorists had become preoccupied with proving their ability to predict the future, rather than understanding the motives and methods of America’s terrorist enemies. The new incarnation professed that 4GW had become “broader than any technique,” and, in effect, amounted to the “greatest change in war since the Peace of Westphalia.”31 Forgotten was the fact that the theory initially started out as nothing more than a collection of vague, unrestrained speculations regarding future tactics and techniques.

It is to be expected that nonstate actors—whether insurgents, terrorists, guerrillas, street gangs, or other nefarious characters— would try to use the increased mobility that has come about through globalization to pursue their ends.32 The literature on globalization now is quite extensive, and while scholars will continue to debate certain aspects of it, there is at least a growing consensus that it has dramatically increased the mobility of people, weapons, and ideas. It was, therefore, almost inevitable—and by no means unforeseen— that a marriage of sorts would develop between terrorism and globalization. This marriage, in fact, is all there is to the phenomenon that 4GW calls a “super” or “evolved insurgency,” or a “new generation” of warfare.33

Throughout history, terrorists, guerrillas, and similar actors generally aimed at eroding an opponent’s will to fight rather than destroying his means; indeed, noted experts on the topic, such as Walter Laqueur and Ian Beckett, as well as others have devoted considerable time and intellectual energy to understanding the various phenomena of guerrilla warfare, insurgencies, terrorism, and their various combinations and evolutions.34 The difference now is that, with the spread of information and communication technologies and the rise in travel opportunities, all of which have become associated with globalization, terrorists and other nonstate actors enjoy enhanced access to their adversary’s political will. The same can also be said, of course, for states. Regardless, the act of attacking an opponent’s will, kinetically or otherwise, still serves
merely as a means to an end.

The kind of terrorists that 4GW theorists described, for instance, behaved more like German storm troopers of 1918, or Robert Heinlein’s starship troopers of the distant future. Highly intelligent and capable of fighting individually or in small groups, these future terrorists would first seek to infiltrate a society and then attempt to collapse it from within by means of an ill-defined psychocultural “judo throw” of sorts.5

Instead of this fanciful approach, what terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and (to a lesser extent) Al Qaeda actually have done is integrated themselves into the social and political fabric of Muslim societies worldwide. Hamas and Hezbollah, especially, have established themselves as organizations capable of addressing the everyday problems of their constituencies: setting up day cares, kindergartens, schools, medical clinics, youth and women’s centers, sports clubs, social welfare, programs for free meals, and health care.6 Each has also become a powerful political party within their respective governments. In other words, rather than collapsing from within the societies of which they are a part, Hamas and Hezbollah have turned their constituencies into effective weapons by creating strong social, political, and religious ties with them; in short, they have become communal activists for their constituencies, which have, in turn, facilitated the construction and maintenance of substantial financial and logistical networks and safe houses.7 This support then aids in the regeneration of the terrorist groups. Hence, attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah are not designed to implode a society, but to change the political will of their opponents through selective—even precise—targeting of innocents.

Al Qaeda is somewhat different in that its goal is to spark a global uprising, or intifada, among Muslims,and its attacks have been designed to weaken the United States, other Western powers, and Muslim governments in order to prepare the way for that uprising.8 Pursuant to that goal, it and groups sympathetic to it have launched attacks that in 2004 alone killed about 1,500 and wounded about 4,000 people, not including the many victims of operations in Iraq; one-third of all attacks involved non-Western targets, but the bulk of the victims overall were Muslims.9 Still, even its tactics are not the psychological “judo throw” envisioned by 4GW theorists, but an attempt to inflict as many casualties and as much destruction as possible in the hope of provoking a response massive enough to trigger a general uprising by the Islamic community.

To be sure, out-of-the-box thinking is to be applauded; militaries do not do enough of it, for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, some not. However, its value diminishes when that thinking hardens into a box of its own, and when its architects become enamored of it.

Indeed, military theorists from Sun Tzu forward have wrestled with the need to understand the relationship between an adversary’s physical and psychological capacities to resist. Collectively, theorists typically have affirmed that will is the most important factor in war. Hence, since it is so difficult to assess, most military thinkers, like Clausewitz, defaulted to the aim of rendering an enemy defenseless (Wehrlos) by destroying his physical capacity to resist. We would do well to remember that the jihadists and other nefarious actors in the war on terror also face the difficult problem of estimating the will of some of their sworn enemies, the United States and its coalition partners, for example. Underestimating that will, in fact, seems to be a principal characteristic of their ideology.

We would, in fact, be hard pressed to find a conventional conflict in history in which the belligerents did not have as one of their chief aims the changing, if not the complete undermining, of their adversary’s political will. It is tempting, for instance, to see World War I as little more than a brutal contest of attrition involving waves of men and massive barrages of firepower, which is how 4GW theorists see it. However, that perspective overlooks the fact that the ultimate aim of campaigns of attrition such as Verdun was to break the political will of the other side by demonstrating that the cost of continuing the fight was higher than the ends warranted—much like the definition used by the theorists of 4GW.

The problem was that each side tended to miscalculate the resolve of its opponent, believing that the will of the other was just about to break, and that one more major offensive would do the trick. The proponents of 4GW also ignore the many attempts, on each side, to bypass the trenches and attack the will of the enemy in other ways. German air raids on London in 1915 are a case in point; 6 months of bombing caused just over 1,700 deaths, hardly more than a routine day at the front.35 Yet, the fact that the Germans could strike London at all provoked widespread panic among Britons who, for a time, clamored loudly for Britain’s withdrawal from the war. Fortunately, the Germans
lacked the means to increase the tempo of such attacks, and the British developed anti-bombing measures effective enough to deter the bulk of German raids.

In sum, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel with regard to insurgencies—super or otherwise—and their various kin. A great deal of very good work has already been done, especially lately, on that topic, to include the effects that globalization and information technologies have had, are having, and are likely to have, on such movements. We do not need another label, as well as an incoherent supporting logic, to obscure what many have already made clear. The fact that 4GW theorists are not aware of this work, or at least do not acknowledge it, should give us pause indeed. They have not kept up with the scholarship on unconventional wars, nor with changes in the historical interpretations of conventional wars. Their logic is too narrowly focused and irredeemably flawed. In any case, the wheel they have been reinventing will never turn.

Any thoughts?

[PacSubCom]

Thoughts?

If terrorists and armed thugs are having such a hard time, this is bad news for the western powers, since they are the main employers of "nefarious characters". Ah wait. Then they are not called terrorists. Right. And their infrastructure is not at risk because it is the civil infrastructure of the western democracies. Okay. Phew!



The implications are clear:

The main problem to defeat the "bad" insurgents, who do not follow our orders, lies (pun intended) at the home front. How to convince the populace of our benevolent intentions, so we can sustain the use of massive, overwhelming firepower and overwhelming economic pressure against the insurgents´ infrastructure, aka cilvilian population of target countries.

Luckily, our efforts in this regard have mostly succeeded in many cases, eg look at the idea that Al Quaida, a decentralized network of a few hundred operatives and a few thousand sympathizers, may actually be able to unite a deeply fragmented region comprising 500 million people and two continents to form their own theocratic state. Fancy ideas like this can populate our "strategy papers" without further mention or discussion of their viability, combined with popular examples from 100 years ago (and references to happenings 400 years ago), which describe completely different people and circumstances. The popularity of these examples ("London Blitz", "dastardly hun" etc.) diverts attention from our own curious arguments which list tons of advantages for the other side while at the same time testifying their inability to use these new ideas and technologies. At the same time, the millions of victims our anti-infrastructure tactics have produced are never mentioned or are "acceptable losses" (for us).

The main point of this work is not only the idea that this insurgency will be beaten eventually and everything will be okay again, but that non-state movements will not be able to sustain themselves in the future AT ALL. Accordingly, we are on the right track: Violence cannot touch us because we have more violence. Finally we can admit that terrorism is but a nuisance while still be able to administer massive resources to accomplish our goals and at the same time convey the impression of fighting terror.