William S. Lind on 4GW
Van Creveld’s non-trinitarian view of the world is fundamental to 4GW, a concept that is traced to a seminal 1989 Military Review article by William S. Lind and four US military officers. In it Lind, at the time at the Washington-based conservative think tank the Free Congress Foundation, argued that over the course of modern history, developments in warfare had gone through three distinct ‘generations’ of military development, defined by watersheds that had been dialectically qualitative, and was set to move into a fourth generation. The first three generations concerned armies and states and thus could be located in the trinitarian universe of Clausewitz (although Lind himself did not use this term). They included the first-generation tactics of infantry lines and columns; the second-generation move to indirect fire, where massed firepower from artillery replaced massed manpower, but where tactics remained essentially linear; and the non-linear, manoeuvre warfare of the third generation, displayed most notably during World War Two.
These generations did not replace but overlapped one another. Lind argued, for example, that second-generation warfare remained the US Army’s modus operandi until the 1980s, long after Germany had introduced third-generation warfare in the form of Blitzkrieg. Moreover, numerous features of third-generation warfare could be expected to carry over into the fourth: greater dispersion on the battlefield; increased speed and tempo of operations; decreased dependence on centralized logistics; more emphasis on manoeuvre and less on mass; smaller, more agile forces; non-linear warfare with no definable battle lines or fronts; and an increasing dependence on joint operations. Most, if not all, of these features were later bundled into a package known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) (see Chapter 7). Indeed, Lind’s first vision for 4GW, a potential technology-driven fourth generation, aligns closely with 1990s perspectives on the RMA: ‘Technologically … very few soldiers could have the same battlefield effect as a current [1989] brigade’; ‘highly mobile elements, composed of very intelligent soldiers armed with high-technology, may range over wide areas; ‘units will combine reconnaissance and strike functions’; ‘[r]emote, “smart” assets … may play a key role.’21
The strategic thought for which Lind is remembered, and continues to be quoted, is his second vision of future war, a potential idea-driven fourth generation. Conducted by non-state entities such as terrorists, 4GW can be distinguished by at least two important signposts, both of which first emerged in second-generation warfare and were present in the third but are pushed to a qualitatively greater degree in 4GW. The first is a shift in focus from the enemy’s front to his rear. ‘Terrorism’, Lind argues, ‘takes this [pre-existing trend] a major step further. It attempts to bypass the enemy’s military entirely and strike directly at his homeland – at civilian targets. Ideally the enemy’s military is simply irrelevant to the terrorist.’ The second signpost centres on the aspect of using the enemy’s strength against him. ‘Terrorists use a free society’s freedom and openness, its greatest strengths, against it. They can move freely within our society, while actively working to subvert it.’22
Lind also identifies additional possible elements of 4GW. Such an attacker might: not work within a nation-state (i.e. trinitarian) framework but rather have a non-national or transnational base, such as an ideology or religion; conduct direct attacks on the enemy’s culture, bypassing not only its military, but also the state itself, in the manner, for example, that drug trafficking directly targets US citizens; and use highly sophisticated psychological warfare directly against the people, especially through the manipulation of television news media. All these things in combination, Lind and his colleagues argued, could constitute at least the beginnings of a fourth generation of warfare. ‘[T]he progressive weakening of the state and the rise of alternative, non-state primary loyalties’, he later argued, ‘constitutes the heart of my definition of Fourth Generation war’.23
Thomas X. Hammes on 4GW
The highly prescient content of Lind’s potential idea-driven fourth generation of warfare – which in many ways anticipated the rise of al Qaeda a decade later – is the starting point of strategic thought on 4GW in the early post-9/11 period. The most notable theorist in this regard is Thomas X. Hammes, a colonel in the US Marine Corps, who has presented his ideas on 4GW in a number of articles and in his 2004 book The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. For Hammes, 4GW is ‘an evolved form of insurgency’. Mao was the originator of this form of war, but whereas Mao initially set out a three-phase plan that would arouse and unite the Chinese people against the outside power, Japan, 4GW skips the population altogether, directly targeting the mind of the enemy decision maker.
The phenomenon of direct attacks against the far enemy is not new. It dates to Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese President and military commander respectively, who during the Vietnam War followed a refined Maoist model by combining the three-phased approach with an aggressive, direct attack on the national will of the outside power, first France and then the United States.24 The distinction here is that 4GW has largely dropped the population aspect altogether, while the internet and globalized communications have made the direct approach, previously dependent on television coverage, exponentially more potent. Hammes also points out that contemporary insurgents are no longer the unified, hierarchical organizations that the Chinese and later the Vietnamese developed in the early and middle twentieth century. Rather, there has been a worldwide shift from hierarchical to networked organizations. In some cases they are based on traditional linkages between and among people, simple real-world networks, including criminal networks. But in most they operate in cyberspace, ultimately connected through the internet.
4GW, like all insurgencies, does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s military forces. For Hammes, it is a form of war that ‘uses all available networks – political, economic, social and military – to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit’.25 He equates 4GW to ‘netwar’, a term originated by RAND scholars John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in the early 1990s. In their conception, netwar pertains to conflicts short of war, involves actors who may or may not be military and is distinguished by the fact that at least one of the protagonists, usually a non-state, paramilitary or other irregular force, organizes as a network rather than a hierarchy. ‘An archetypal netwar actor consists of a web (or network) of dispersed, interconnected “nodes” … The design is both acephalous (headless) and polycephalous (hydra-headed).’26 For Arquilla and Ronfeldt, netwar involves ‘trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it’.27 The concept both reflects, and is tied to, the information revolution.
Targeting the minds of enemy decision makers is the organizing principle that governs 4GW activities at each of the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Strategically, 4GW practitioners will undertake a communications plan using such things as insurgent websites and the global communications media in general. Operationally, 4GW opponents ‘will examine our entire society to find vulnerabilities’ and then attempt to strike them. The quintessential example is the 9/11 attacks, but other scenarios can be envisioned. Tactically, 4GW takes place in the complex environment of low-intensity conflict – here is the connection of 4GW to actual insurgent activity on the ground. The more dramatic and bloody the image, the stronger the message. These high-impact messages will probably come through visual media and they will be part of, indeed the substance of, ‘a strategic communications plan designed to shift their enemy’s view of the world’.28 Once the outside power is driven out, Hammes argues, there will ensue a traditional second-generation civil war (i.e. war amongst the people) – or perhaps, although he does not say this, a ‘traditional’ insurgency along Maoist lines.
Critiques
The concept of 4GW has been criticized on at least three broad fron
ts. The first is the degree to which terrorists and insurgents are effective against countries and militaries stuck in the second or third generation of warfare. Based on an examination of history, argues one scholar, ‘it is probably a bit hasty to conclude that non-traditional forms of warfare will always best traditional forces’.29 A second and related critique is the degree to which the focus on insurgency and 4GW is appropriate, or whether it is a luxury afforded only by the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century there is an ‘unusual and temporary absence of Great Power conflictuality’.30
But the strongest critique is whether Hammes actually identified something novel or new. This is an unresolved question in Hammes’ own strategic thought, which argues at the same time that 4GW has been around for seven decades, has been the dominant form of warfare for 50 years and is a ‘new form of war’. 4GW, at least at the strategic level, is different from the indigenous population-centric insurgency of Mao. The notion of operational-level attacks against the enemy’s society at home is also a new element, as is the shift from hierarchical to networked insurgent ‘leadership’. But, with the exception of advancements in communications technology, it is difficult to distinguish the core of Hammes’ 4GW conception – directly targeting the minds of enemy decision makers – from the North Vietnamese approach, which after the defeat at Tet in 1968 shifted from targeting US military forces in Vietnam to directly weakening US political will at home. In this regard, a large part of the 4GW concept arguably comes down to the relatively new and pervasive power of the internet. Perhaps this is the true ‘potential technology-driven fourth generation of warfare’ alluded to by Lind at the close of the Cold War.
New wars scholars
The strategic thought of William Lind and Thomas Hammes has been characterized as a popular form of ‘new wars’ thinking.31 This is a term that first emerged in the 1990s, largely in response to the civil war in former Yugoslavia, but also elsewhere, and the difficulty faced by the international (state-based) community in addressing such conflicts. One of the best-known new wars scholars is Mary Kaldor, whose 1999 volume New and Old Wars argued that in the 1990s a type of organized violence emerged in Africa and Eastern Europe that was ‘new’ in terms of its goals and methods of warfare. Echoing van Creveld, she argues that these new wars arose in the context of the erosion of the autonomy of the state and in some cases the complete disintegration of the state. In place of the geopolitical or ideological goals of the Cold War, new wars were about ‘identity politics’, or the claim to power on the basis of having a particular national, clan, religious or linguistic identity.32 In its prosecution, she argues, new warfare borrows from revolutionary warfare the strategy of controlling territory through political control rather than capturing territory from enemy forces, a task that is somewhat easier in the case of new wars since the central authority is weak or non-existent. But whereas ‘traditional’ guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency is at least in theory aimed at political control of the population through winning ‘hearts and minds’, the new warfare aimed at controlling it by getting rid of everyone of a different identity, through such means as population expulsion, forcible resettlement and mass killing. The phenomenon was captured at the time in the well-used phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’.
In The New Wars, Herfried Munkler similarly argues that in such wars force is mainly directed not against the enemy’s armed force but against the civilian population. Fighting may flare up anywhere; there is no distinction between front, rear and homeland, no decisive battle of the sort that characterizes inter-state war. In new wars the conduct of war involves direct attacks using terrorist tactics, an ‘offensive form of the strategic asymmetrization of force’,33 rather than the more traditional indirect targeting of guerrilla warfare. The aim of fighting is either to drive a population from a certain area through ethnic cleansing, or to force it to supply and support certain groups. This latter phenomenon draws in the economic dimension, wherein a large aspect of new wars involves war as a way of life. The boundaries between working life and war become blurred, players are driven more by economic motives than political ones, and they essentially make a living out of war, in some cases amassing fortunes. For Munkler, the two main features that differentiate the new wars from the inter-state wars of the past are their commercialization and their growing asymmetry.
Britain’s Rupert Smith, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe during NATO’s (1999) Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, does not use the ‘new wars’ terminology in his 2005 book The Utility of Force, but he does draw out changes in the conduct of war that echo the new wars literature. Smith argues a paradigm shift has taken place in war, from inter-state industrial war of comparable, largely symmetric forces waging war on a battlefield, to a paradigm of ‘war amongst the people [that] reflects the hard fact that there is no secluded battlefield upon which armies engage, nor are there necessarily armies, definitely not on all sides’. War among the people, he argues, ‘is the reality in which the people in the streets and houses and fields – all the people, anywhere – are the battlefield. Military engagements can take place anywhere: in the presence of civilians, against civilians, in defence of civilians’ and they are between sides that are mostly non-state.34
Scholar Richard Shultz goes still further than Kaldor and Smith, identifying a specific set of questions that can give an ‘operational-level assessment of how internal warfare is conducted by modern warriors’.35 Questions within the framework centre on the non-state armed groups’ concept of warfare, organization and command and control, area of operations, types and targets of operations, and constraints and limitations, like the laws of armed conflict. A final category is the role of outside actors. Many argue inter-communal strife is nothing new – it existed in the early twentieth century and before. Rather, what has been new in the post-Cold War era has been stepped-up efforts on the part of the international community to intervene in or address the strife, often played out in the global media. The character of new war accordingly forms the backdrop against which Smith presents his strategic thought on trends that make up the paradigm of war among the people from the perspective of the (state-based) intervener. Among the trends he identifies is the fact that the interveners, no less so than the parties themselves, fight amongt the people and not on the battlefield. Because the enemy is hiding in and among the people, the challenge faced by the intervening force is ‘to differentiate between the enemy and the people and to win the latter over to you’. In addition, and significantly, the ends for which organizations like NATO fight ‘are changing from the hard objectives that decide a political outcome to those establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided’. The objective of intervention is not to take or hold territory but to create a condition in which humanitarian activity can take place and a political outcome can be negotiated. ‘Overall’, Smith argues, ‘if decisive victory was the hallmark of inter-state war, establishing [such] a condition may be deemed the hallmark of the new paradigm of war against the people’.36
How best to create such a condition was then, and remains now, an unanswered question. Kaldor argues that approaches like peacekeeping and peace-enforcement, attempted by the international community during the 1990s, are not appropriate because they still treat the new wars ‘as Clausewitzian wars in which the warring parties are states, or if not states, groups with a claim to statehood’. She argues instead for ‘a new form of cosmopolitan political mobilization, which embraces both the so-called international community and local populations, and which is capable of countering … particularism’, and calls on the international community to engage in an ambitious agenda of enforcing cosmopolitan norms, including international humanitarian and human rights law.37 Smith is more practical in his approach, arguing that in planning an intervention with military force the international community must start by giving coherent answers to two sets of questions. The first set centres on defining ‘the outcome and the effort to be set to achieving it’, while t
he second set focuses on making the intervention credible in the eyes of the people and the opponent that is hiding in and among the people.38 Determining what objectives can be achieved by military force, and the limitations on the use of force beyond them, forms the overarching strategic starting point – a reality Smith applies not just to the new wars of the 1990s but also to the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq in the period after the 2003 Iraq War.
As with 4GW, critics made the case that new wars scholars had not actually identified a new phenomenon. ‘[A]ll of the factors that characterize new wars have been present, to varying degree, throughout the last 100 years’, noted one scholar during the heyday of new wars scholarship in the early 2000s. ‘The difference today is that academics, policy analysts, and politicians are focusing on these factors more than before.’39 Later, the point was made that while the new wars scholarship contributed significantly to understanding why conventional approaches may not be appropriate to contemporary war, it erred in dismissing Clausewitz. The Prussian’s characterization of war as consisting of violence, change and rationality is highly relevant to the analysis of twenty-first-century civil wars and insurgencies, it is argued, because ‘even the most violent insurgents envision their actions as working toward a cause they perceive to be rational’.40
David Kilcullen on insurgency and counterinsurgency
In his strategic thought David Kilcullen goes somewhat further than Hammes in pinpointing the new character of insurgency. A Lieutenant Colonel in the Australian Army who later advised the Pentagon on counterinsurgency, Kilcullen identifies the key distinguishing aspect of post-Cold War insurgency as lying not in the method but in the goal of revolutionary or insurgent activity. The global jihad being waged by al Qaeda, he argued in a 2005 article that caught the Pentagon’s attention, is clearly an insurgency – that is, a popular movement that seeks to change the status quo through violence and subversion: so far, so much the same as a classical Maoist insurgency. But, he goes on, ‘whereas traditional insurgencies sought to overthrow established governments or social orders in one state or district, this insurgency seeks to transform the entire Islamic world and remake its relationship with the rest of the globe’.41 Classical theory, he elaborates in later work, treats insurgency as something that occurs within one country, between a non-state actor and a single government, with the goal being to gain control of the state. But many contemporary insurgents may be simply trying to destroy the state, not seize control of the reins of power. ‘The insurgents seek to expel foreigners, but have little to say about what might replace the national government.’42 Moreover, in al Qaeda-linked insurgencies, the insurgent may not be seeking to achieve any practical, real-world objective, but rather to gain God’s favour.
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