War evolves into the fourth generation: A comment on Thomas X. Hammes

Abstract

Posing the most serious challenge to international security today, fourth-generation warfare (4GW) 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. It is rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power. 4GW does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy's military forces. Instead, combining guerrilla tactics or civil disobedience with the soft networks of social, cultural and economic ties, disinformation campaigns and innovative political activity, it directly attacks the enemy's political will. Over the past 50 years, 4GW has defeated superpowers in Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Chechnya. Each time, using protracted campaigns, the insurgents defeated the will of the enemy rather than his military. In sum, 4GW is political, socially (rather than technically) networked and protracted in duration. It is the antithesis of the high-technology, short war the Pentagon is preparing to fight.

Notes

1. The belief that military policy should shape foreign policy existed prior to Vietnam. Although Korea was not as humiliating for the armed forces as Vietnam, and was fought on a largely conventional basis, it was frustrating, and reinforced military distrust of politically-imposed restraints. This led to the view that if wars were to be fought they must be fought on military terms, although the armed forces disagreed amongst themselves on what these terms might be. This was the position as the Kennedy administration debated its response to the communist challenge in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. This was reflected in the resistance to attempts to encourage a politically-sensitive (‘hearts and minds’) counter-insurgency campaign. I deal with this period in Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

2. H. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982).

3. Weinberger's first test was that the US ‘should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies’. The other tests referred to the need, once a commitment had been made do so wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning, with clearly defined political and military objectives, continually reassessing the relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed, with the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress, and as a last resort. Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1990), pp.453–4.

4. Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), p.576.

5. William S. Lind, Col. Keith Nightengale, Capt. John F. Schmitt, Col. Joseph W. Sutton and Lieut. Col. Gary I. Wilson, ‘The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation’, Marine Corps Gazette (Oct. 1989), pp.22–6.

6. William Lind, ‘Understanding Fourth Generation War’, MilitaryReview (Sept.–Oct. 2004), pp.12–16. This reports the findings of a study group which he convened at his house. Lind's commentaries can befound at <www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind-arch.html>. On Lind's political stance, see Bill Berkowitz, ‘A Mighty Lind’, 22 Sept. 2003, <www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15659>. After the Oklahoma bombing the Washington Post (‘Militant Musings: From Nightmare 1995 to My Utopian 2050’, 30 April 1995) reprinted an extract from a short story by Lind, written some time earlier. This involved a scenario which began in 2001 with a currency collapse (‘Financial Weimar had followed cultural Weimar’), followed by an AIDS epidemic masked by officials so terrified of the ‘gay lobby’, that they insisted ‘that “homophobia” was the real problem’. By 2005, when people ‘demanded the quarantine of anyone diagnosed as HIV positive’, the government instead ‘classified the infected as “disabled”, which made any preventive measures illegal discrimination’.

7. Lind, ‘Understanding Fourth Generation War’, p.16.

8. Even here we might note that the concept barely does justice to the forms which regular battle can take, not only from attrition trench warfare to blitzkrieg, but from desert to jungle warfare, from urban combat to grand tank battles.

9. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997). See also C.E. Caldwell, Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (Lincoln, NB, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

10. Max Weber: Politics as a Vocation, 1919. Reprinted in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Galaxy Books, 1958).