Military History and Fourth Generation Warfare

Abstract

This article examines ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’ (4GW), a theory of how warfare has evolved and is evolving, from the perspective of military history. The author makes three primary claims: 4GW advocates' boxing of history into ‘generations’ is logically and temporally inconsistent; 4GW authors misuse history by selectively choosing case studies and applying them out of context; and other arguments regarding the current and future character of warfare are more convincing. The author concludes that scholars and policymakers would be well served by considering elements of 4GW, particularly its analysis of insurgency, but that the concept should be subsumed by a broader US grand strategy that retains a strong focus on preparation for conventional warfare.

Key Words:

• Fourth Generation Warfare
• Network-Centric Warfare
• Insurgency

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Tom Mahnken, Avery Goldstein, Mike Horowitz, Mike Wasserman, Joe Cyrulik, and the anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. He would also like to thank Mary Habeck for her advice regarding the development of the case studies.

Notes

¹William S. Lind, Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, ‘The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation’, Marine Corps Gazette (Oct. 1989), 22–6.

²William S. Lind, ‘Understanding Fourth Generation War’, Military Review 84/5 (Sept./Oct. 2004), 14.

³Col. Thomas X. Hammes USMC, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St Paul, MN: Zenith Press 2004). See Lind's book review of The Sling and the Stone, published on the Defense and the National Interest website: ‘[Hammes] makes a major error early, in that he equates Fourth Generation War with insurgency.’ William S. Lind, ‘The Sling and the Stone’, Free Congress Foundation Paper On War#90 (Nov. 2004). Lind's ire is well-directed: in a PowerPoint briefing dated Nov. 2004, Hammes' title reads, ‘Fourth Generation War: Insurgency on Steroids'.

⁴Lind, ‘Understanding Fourth Generation War’, 16.

⁵Lind, ‘Understanding Fourth Generation War’, 13–14.

⁶Thomas X. Hammes, ‘War Evolves Into the Fourth Generation’, Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 190.

⁷Other authors and literature associated with the school include retired Lt. Col. Greg Wilcox, ‘Fourth Generation Warfare and the Information Arrow’, Free Congress Foundation Paper (Jul. 2005) and ‘Fourth Generation Warfare: the Moral Imperative’, Free Congress Foundation Paper (Oct. 2003); Ret. Col. G.I. Wilson and Ret. Col. Chester Richards, who along with Wilcox have tried to affect Pentagon policy through PowerPoint briefings rather than academic literature, as described by Elaine Grossman, ‘An “OODA Loop” Writ Large: New Briefing Applies 4th Generation Warfare ideas to Iraq Conflict’, Inside the Pentagon, 23 Dec. 2004, available electronically at <www.d-n-i.net/grossman/ooda_loop_writ.htm>. An example of these briefings is ‘4GW and the OODA Loop: Implications of the Iraqi Insurgency’ (April 2005) delivered to the Panel on Conceptual Frontiers, 16th Annual US Army War College Strategy Conference, Carlisle, PA.

⁸In his book review of The Sling and the Stone, Lind claims that the shift to 4GW is not about how war is fought, but by who is fighting it. That does not explain the first three generations, however, and so this attempted quick fix does not suffice to explain the ‘generations’ concept.

⁹The first is a basic question regarding whether or not there can be such a thing as a dominant way of war at a given time; war is a dynamic process during which either side is constantly seeking an advantage over the other. This is, however, a broad issue that requires a more thorough analysis than may be provided here, and so this paper will criticize the generational concept within the 4GW framework.

¹⁰David Sorenson, ‘The Mythology of Fourth-Generation Warfare: A Response to Hammes', Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 264.

¹¹Antulio J. Echevarria, ‘The Problem With Fourth-Generation War’, US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute Opinion Editorial (Feb. 2005); Antulio J. Echevarria, Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute Monograph Nov. 2005).

¹²Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, 44.

¹³The index to The Sling and the Stone contains no references to anything ‘nuclear’. In the first article describing the characteristics of 4GW, Lind, Nightengale, Schmitt, Sutton, and Wilson's ‘The Changing Face of War’, they use non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse as an example to suggest that ‘technologically, it is possible that a very few soldiers could have the same battlefield effect as a current brigade’. An odd choice; they do not consider nuclear electromagnetic pulse or any other aspects of nuclear war in 4GW other than to say ‘this kind of high-technology fourth generation warfare may carry in it the seeds of nuclear destruction. Its effectiveness could rapidly eliminate the ability of a nuclear-armed opponent to wage war conventionally’.

¹⁴An important exception is John Mueller's contrarian analysis, ‘The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World’, International Security 13/2 (Autumn 1998), 55–79.

¹⁵This paper follows Robert Gilpin's definition of ‘governance’ and concept of systemic change in international relations as established in War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: CUP 1981).

¹⁶The US Department of Defense's (DoD's) Office of Force Transformation, prior to having been disbanded and merged into a new office subordinate to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, defined network-centric warfare as ‘an information advantage-enabled concept of operations that generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decisionmakers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of self-synchronization. In essence, NCW translates information superiority into combat power by effectively linking knowledgeable entities in the battlespace.’ For further reading on this concept, see OFT's booklet, ‘The Implementation of Network-Centric Warfare’, available on the DoD website at http://www.oft.osd.mil/library/library_files/document_387_NCW_Book_LowRes.pdf

¹⁷For example, ‘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’, in Hammes, ‘War Evolves Into the Fourth Generation’, 190. Lind is more acidic in criticizing the US military: ‘Aviation has replaced artillery as the source of most firepower, but otherwise (and despite the USMC's formal doctrine, which is Third Generation maneuver warfare), the US military today is as French as white wine and cheese. At the USMC desert warfare training center in California, the only thing missing is the tricolor and a picture of General Maurice Gamelin in the headquarters', in Lind, ‘Understanding Fourth Generation War’, 13.

¹⁸Echevarria, ‘The Problem with Fourth Generation Warfare’, and ‘Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths’. Also Antulio J. Echevarria, ‘Deconstructing the Theory of Fourth-Generation Warfare’, Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 237–9.

¹⁹Thomas X. Hammes, ‘Reaction’, Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 279.

²⁰The Quadrennial Defense Review, last published in Feb. 2006, may be viewed on the US DoD website at <www.defenselink.mil/qdr/>. The very first sentence in the preface establishes that the United States will be engaged in a ‘long war’, which refers to the military's and intelligence community's worldwide counterterrorism effort.

²¹Robert M. Gates, ‘A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age’, Foreign Affairs 88/1 (Jan./Feb. 2009), 28–40.

²²DoD Office of Force Transformation booklet, The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare, 29–31.

²³One useful overview is Dale G. Uhler, ‘Technology: Force Multiplier for Special Operations’, Joint Forces Quarterly 40 (1st quarter 2006), 54–9.

²⁴For a thorough treatment of the United States' dramatic conventional military superiority, see Barry Posen, ‘Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony’, International Security 28/1 (Summer 2003), 5–46.

²⁵Some of the 4GW critics in the Contemporary Security Policy roundtable point to Hammes' selectivity, including John Ferris, who writes, ‘Hammes loots the past for pedigree while discarding anything that does not fit his needs … only a single generation can exist at a time, except when one is beating another to death … yet in reality, several generations coexist at any time, many things occur in any ‘age’ which do not fit the name, and the world is filled with contrary trends', in John Ferris, ‘Generations at War?’, Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 250.

²⁶Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, 53.

²⁷Ibid., 54.

²⁸Hammes also highlights the importance of Mao's writing in his response to the roundtable on 4GW in Contemporary Security Policy, ‘asking why I give Mao credit for being the father of 4GW is a legitimate question. I do so simply because he was the first to write a clear, concise instruction manual that was widely distributed and followed … ’. Hammes, ‘Response’, 281.

²⁹Trevor Dupuy, The Military History of the Chinese Civil War (New York: Franklin Watts 1969), 43, and Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (New York: Morrow 1994), 255–7.

³⁰‘For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.’ Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford: OUP 1971), 77.

³³Hammes, ‘Response’, 282.

³¹Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, 54.

³²In the roundtable, Michael Evans highlights that both Mao and Gen. Giap (in Vietnam) won their wars not with insurgency, but with conventional operations. Michael Evans, ‘Elegant Irrelevance Revisited: A Critique of Fourth-Generation Warfare’, Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 245.

³⁴Indeed, Hammes' own definition of 4GW says, ‘4GW does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy's military forces', see the block quote in the ‘Theory’ section of this paper.

³⁵Hammes, ‘Response’, 283.

³⁶Asprey, War in the Shadows, 38–9.

³⁷Some of the tactics were remarkably the same, however, including booby traps with iron-spiked stakes and using the terrain to guerrillas' advantage.

³⁸For further reading on the potential for US military success in Vietnam, see Lewis Sorley, A Better War (Orlando, FL: Harcourt 1999); Jeffrey Record, ‘Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We Have Won?’Parameters 26/4 (Winter 1996/97), 51–65; Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge: CUP 2006).

³⁹For further reading on Soviet support for North Vietnam, see Douglas Pike, Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance (Boulder, CO: Westview 1987), on Chinese support, Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press 2000), and on the nexus of the three, Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnam Relations and the Role of China, 1949–64 (London: Routledge 2006).

⁴⁰James Wirtz, ‘Politics With Guns: A Response to T.X. Hammes', Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 224.

⁴¹Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, 3, and also Hammes, ‘War Evolves Into the Fourth Generation’, 189–90.

⁴²Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, 179.

⁴³Thomas X. Hammes, ‘Insurgency: Modern Warfare Evolves Into a Fourth Generation’, Strategic Forum 214 (2005), and in The Sling and the Stone, 4.

⁴⁴For further reading on the conflict, see Michael Oren, Six Days of War (Oxford: OUP 2002).

⁴⁵For example, ‘these techniques or strategies are not new, but something else is – the reduction in the entry cost of political organization needed for insurgency’, Ferris, ‘Generations at War?’, 252; ‘I argue that the activities covered by 4GW are best viewed not as an evolution from earlier, more conventional types of warfare but instead as aspects of a separate process, reflecting strategies that the weak have long adopted in conflicts with superior military powers', ‘the idea that there is something strikingly novel about groups that come together “as networks to achieve short term common goals and then go their own way” is bizarre. It is a common theme of political life,’ and ‘this is the approach of guerrillas, resisters, partisans, insurgents, subversives, insurrectionists, revolutionaries, secessionists and terrorists, and it has a long history. They are not a progression from forms of “proper war”, but instead constitute a parallel development’, Lawrence Freedman, ‘War Evolves into the Fourth Generation: A Comment on T.X. Hammes', Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 254, 259, and 260, respectively; ‘When you look closely, 4GW is just another term to describe what many a soldier has been dealing with for many a year – insurgencies', Rod Thornton, ‘Fourth Generation: A “New” Form of “Warfare”?’, Contemporary Security Policy 26/2 (Aug. 2005), 272.

⁴⁶For further reading on guerrilla warfare against the Roman Empire, see Asprey, War in the Shadows.

⁴⁷For further reading on irregular warfare in the American war of independence, see John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press 1990), particularly Ch. 6, ‘American Strategy: Charles Lee and the Radical Alternative’, 133–62. Shy relies on Lee's personal correspondence and writing in reconstructing his plans for an American guerrilla war. Also Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill & Wang 1976), and an unlikely candidate, former CIA Director William Casey's history of the American Revolution, Where and How the War Was Fought: An Armchair Tour of the American Revolution (New York: William & Morrow 1976). Casey's very first sentences read, ‘The American Revolution was both political and military. The Americans fought irregular, partisan, guerrilla warfare.’ A later statement highlights the relevance of the American Revolution to the present discussion, ‘Washington had put together the fundamental ideas of modern revolutionary warfare. He won the war without winning a major battle, as Greene liberated the Carolinas while losing every battle he fought’, 22.

⁴⁸For further reading on the Peninsular War, see Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003); Ian Fletcher (ed.), The Peninsular War: Aspects of the Struggle for the Iberian Peninsula (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount 1998); and David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (New York: Norton 1986).

⁴⁹Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2000), 187.

⁵⁰Linn, The Philippine War, 255. See also Asprey, War in the Shadows, ‘Aguinaldo, seeing a Democratic victory as his only hope, called for general escalation of resistance in order to keep the issue in American headlines', 130.

⁵¹Steven David presents a compelling argument that a major security concern to the United States is spillover consequences from civil war and other internal conflicts in his article ‘On Civil War’, published in The American Interest 2/4 (Mar./Apr. 2007).

⁵²For instance, see the ‘Balancing Acts' issue of International Security 30/1 (Summer 2005), and Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion Revisited: The Coming End of the United States' Unipolar Moment’, International Security 31/2 (Fall 2006), 7–41.

⁵³This statement, of course, generously discounts US peacekeeping and deterrence operations. If these are included in the definition of ‘conventional’ military activity – a fair claim to make given their persistence throughout the past half-century – then conventional warfare is a daily phenomenon.

⁵⁴Defense journals have done an especially good job of tracking services' NCW-related information technology acquisitions and contracts. Some examples include: David A. Fulghum, ‘Talking Radars', Aviation Week & Space Technology 163/23 (2005), 24–5; David A. Fulghum, ‘Wireless War’, Aviation Week & Space Technology 163/16 (2005), 48–50; Uhler, ‘Technology: Force Multiplier for Special Operations', 54–9; Ted McKenna, ‘US Army Hopes to Weed Out Redundant C2 Systems’, Journal of Electronic Defense 28/12 (Dec. 2005), 23–5; Brendan Rivers, ‘New Sensors for FCS Ground Vehicles’, Journal of Electronic Defense 28/8 (Aug. 2005), 19–20; John Keller, ‘Transformational Communications’, Military and Aerospace Electronics 16/5 (May 2005), 26–33; Adam Baddeley, ‘Data Links: Into the Light?’Military Technology 29/5 (2005), 63–70; P.W. Phister Jr and I.G. Plonisch, ‘Military Applications of Information Technologies: The US Air Force's Approach’, Military Technology 29/5 (May 2005), 58–62; Gerard Titi, ‘The Next Steps in Advanced ISR Radars’, Military Technology 29/8 (Aug. 2005), 58–60; Christopher J. Toomey, ‘Army Digitization: Making it Ready for Prime Time’, Parameters 33/4 (Winter 2003/04), 40–53.

⁵⁵See, for example, Stephen Peter Rosen's Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1994), in which Rosen argues that military innovation occurs when mid- or low-level officers become convinced of the utility of a new system from experience. These officers then protect the innovation as they are promoted and are in a position to promote and appoint subordinates who also believe in the value of the new system.

⁵⁶The command and control of Predator aircraft is widely reported in the press. For example, listen to Mary Louise Kelley's radio broadcast of a visit to the center from which the UAVs are flown. ‘The Nevada Home of the Predator Drone Craft’, National Public Radio, 16 Sept. 2005. See also Robert Kaplan's article based on a visit to the same center, ‘Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas’, Atlantic Monthly 298/2 (Sept. 2006), 81–4.

⁵⁷Richard K. Betts, ‘Compromised Command: Inside NATO's First War’, Foreign Affairs 80/4 (Jul./Aug. 2001), 126–32.