The mythology of fourth-generation warfare: A response to Hammes1

1. The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the US Air Force or any other government agency. Jeffrey Record and Judith Gentleman provided helpful comments.

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Notes

1. The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the US Air Force or any other government agency. Jeffrey Record and Judith Gentleman provided helpful comments.

2. Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

3. Mao Tse-tung discusses theories of warfare in Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted War (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1967) where the chapter ‘War and Politics’ indicates that Mao is perhaps closer to Clausewitz than Marx or Lenin; and in ‘Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War Against Japan’, ‘The Strategic Defensive and the Strategic Offensive in Guerilla War’ and ‘The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War’, in The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. II. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp.75–106; 195–212. See also Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerilla Warfare, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1961); and Dick Wilson, Mao Tse-Tung in the Scales of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Chap. 4.

4. The Philippine Insurrection had many elements that would later replay in Vietnam, including a charismatic leader, guerrilla tactics, domestic opposition in the US and popular support derived partly from American tactics that induced high civilian casualties. See Stuart Miller Creighton, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1902 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982).

5. The best discussion of these campaigns is in William W. Whitson, The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927–71 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973). The CCP military leaders learned bitter lessons after the first application of ‘people's war’ resulted in the disastrous failures of the ‘Autumn Harvest Uprisings’ in central China in 1927. See Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

6. Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978).

7. Chalmers Johnson, Autopsy on People's War (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1973), esp. Chaps. 2, 5.

8. The success of their tactics varied with conditions, but often they were aided by South Vietnamese officials and American troops who frequently mishandled or misunderstood the situations, creating antipathy for the anti-communist side, if not always sympathy and support for the Viet Cong. For a good example, see Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1972).

9. John E. Mueller, Wars, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973).

10. Robert L. Gallucci, Neither Peace nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: The Naval Institute Press, 1998), for examples.

11. Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), Chap. 2.

12. See John A. Booth. The End and the Beginning. The Nicaraguan Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), esp. Chaps 7 and 8.

13. One of Mao's basic principles of ‘people's war’ was unity of purpose under the banner of the Communist Party (or at least some revolutionary party). But Palestinian loyalty was divided between the PLO, Hamas, several Islamist organizations, and often did not extend beyond the neighbourhood organization. Moreover, most Palestinians knew about the alleged corruption of the PLO (and later PA), which weakened their support for it. See Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Makings of a People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Hayim Gordon, Rivca Gordon and Taher Shriteh, Beyond Intifada: Narratives of Freedom Fighters in the Gaza Strip (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003); and Barry M Rubin, The Transformation of Palestinian Politics: From Revolution to State Building (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

14. Colin S. Gray, ‘How Has War Changed Since the End of the Cold War?’, Parameters, Vol.35, No.1 (Spring 2005), p.17.

15. Typical of ‘transformational’ systems is the Army's ‘Future Combat System’, an effort to combine 53 ‘crucial technologies’. According to one source, ‘The Army wants Future Combat to be a smaller, faster force than the one now fighting in Iraq. Tanks, mobile cannons and personnel carriers would be made so light that they could be flown to a war zone’. The emphasis is on deployability, but there is little evidence that the Army's Future Combat System, like most other Rumsfeld-era transformations, are guided by threat assessment instead of a desire to increase the speed of force deployment. ‘An Army Program to Build a High-Tech Force Hits Snags’, The New York Times, 28 March 2005. The emphasis on saving money was made emphatically by a former DOD Comptroller, Dov Zakheim, ‘Money Drives Rumsfeld's Changes’, London Financial Times, 29 March 2005.

16. The most thorough discussion to date of the allegations involving manipulation and misuse of information on Iraq by the Bush administration for OIF is found in Chaim Kaufmann, ‘Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War’, International Security, Vol.29, No.1 (Summer 2004), pp.5–48.

17. Geoffrey Perret, Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II (New York: Random House, 1993), pp.457–8; Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p.333. This was obviously not the only or even the major reason for the air assault against Japan, but it was an increasingly troubling aspect of the war, particularly after the particularly bloody Okinawa campaign.