Fourth Generation Warfare: How Tactics of the Weak Confound the Strong, September
10, 2003
Fourth Generation Warfare:
How Tactics of the
Weak Confound the Strong
September 10, 2003
Comment: #490
Discussion Threads - Comments #s: 489,
476, 453,
427, 429, 431,
400 together with referenced comments.
Two years ago tomorrow, the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon plunged America into a different kind of war. The
President went before Congress in late September 2001 and declared war on
Osama bin Ladin, al Qaeda and those who support him. He divided the world
into two neat parts: you are either "with us" or "against us." By
declaring war on a non-national network (or network of networks), Mr. Bush
publicly stated, perhaps without being conscious of the fact, that America
was in a Fourth Generation War [see Thread 1, and Comment #s
427, 429,
431]. Across the world, the attacks had triggered an unprecedented
outpouring of sympathy and empathy for the cause of the United States.
Almost everyone was with us, so America's going in
position was strong from a grand strategic perspective.
That outpouring of support is now a distant memory. In
fact, the U.S. strategy for resolving the terrorist question is now
rejected overwhelmingly by a huge majority of people around the world
— by the citizens of allied nations and the
citizens of uncommitted nations, as well as those of adversary nations.
Today, only one country has a population and government that
whole-heartedly support our strategy — Israel, a
nation that is also pursuing a military strategy that is self-isolating at
the moral level of conflict.
What has gone wrong? How could we squander such an
outpouring of goodwill in such a short time?
As I have argued in earlier Comments (see #s
400, 453,
476), I believe the root cause of our growing grand strategic crisis
is that, like Imperial Germany at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, the
United States has insensibly allowed the destructive dimensions of
military strategy to displace the constructive requirements of a sensible
grand strategy. To make matters worse, unlike Germany at the beginning of
the 20th Century, US military strategy at the beginning of the 21st
Century is not matched to the threat it is fighting: Our strategy
— i.e., the pre-emptive application of hi-tech
"precision" firepower on a "central front" against an adversary who making
a "last stand" — in fighting an amalgam of
fourth generation threats sounds and acts as if it were engaging the more
traditional military threats in a 2GW or 3GW nation-versus-nation
conflict.
What we now call a central front is the boiling
terrorist petri dish in Iraq we created, and we have overstretched of the
U.S. Army to boot [see "An
Analysis of the U.S.Military's Ability to Sustain an Occupation
of Iraq, Congressional Budget Office, September 3, 2003].
Moreover, on the eve of the 2nd anniversary of 9-11,
the threat of terror seems to be spreading; the United States seems to be
mutating into a hated neocolonial occupier in Iraq, a nation which is
beginning to look like a horrifying mix of Lebanon and West Bank. The
American people feel no more secure from the terrorist threat, according
to recent poll done by University of Maryland [Financial Times, September
10, 2003] ; and, as the figure below shows, the President wants to raise
the defense budget to level that would be higher than the peak year in
Vietnam (after the effects of inflation are removed), where, it should be
remembered, we had deployed over 500,000 troops and managed to maintain
sufficient forces elsewhere (Europe, Korea, Japan and nuclear forces on
alert to deter the superpower Soviet Union).
Yet the constraints on the US are worse than those of
the guns and butter days Vietnam War (which, it should be remembered,
eventually broke the bank): While the President remains obsessed with tax
cuts (butter for the rich), budget and trade deficits are plunging out of
control [see Attachments #1, #2, & #3 to Comment 489]
, the ratio of debt to GDP is exploding [see Attachment #4 to Comment
489], US currency is coming under increasing
pressure around the world, and the looming financing requirements of the
aging baby boomers hang over everything like a dark storm cloud [see
Attachment #5 to Comment 489].
In short, whether we like it not, a correction is
coming, the loud protestations of the neoconmen who got us into this mess
notwithstanding. It is time for the American people to demand return to
fundamentals: one place to start is intellectually — by studying the nature
of Fourth Generation War we are confronting, which is something the
current U.S. strategy ignores to our increasing peril.
Read the attached article carefully, it is an
important contribution to the growing literature on the this important
subject.
4GW: Tactics of the Weak Confound the Strong
By G.I. Wilson, John P. Sullivan, and Hal Kempfer
Military.Com
September 8, 2003
http://www.military.com/NewContent?file=Wilson_090803
We live in a world of "Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW)"
where the tactics of the weak confound the tactics of the strong. Today's
global environment is defined by this 4GW reality. Nation-states confront
criminal enterprises, fanatical opportunists, terrorists whose gang-like networks
transcend national boundaries. This smorgasbord of bad actors often slips
through the cracks of our own security, military, and legal bureaucracies.
We are seeing sub-national "bad actors" use guerrilla
tactics, insurrection, sabotage and terrorism to subvert nation-states and
challenge the established international system. Governments, politicians,
and state military-security apparatus of the West; desperately want to engage
our 4GW foes in the tried and true conventional ways of the past.
America, the world's strongest nation, prefers combat
where only the strongest wins. Our fourth-generation foes prefer 4GW judo,
avoiding a decisive fight, leveraging our addiction to technology and "throwing
us" using our own bureaucratic weight to do so. We must recall that the enemy's
"weapons technology advantage" in the 9-11 attacks consisted of box cutters
and ceramic knives, combined with a steely determination to die for a cause.
Also, we must remember that it worked, and our vast military-security-enforcement
bureaucracy was virtually helpless to stop it.
We are witnessing the early stages of a major geo-political
transition. This shift is characterized by a global landscape of conflict
where the division between combatant, criminal opportunist and civilian is
blurred. In this potential global insurgency, the urban guerilla (not to forget
their rural counterparts) may be a religious zealot or a child for hire with
an RPG.
As technophiles, Westerners are enraptured by our modern
weapons of great precision, but have lost sight that people and ideas are
the essence of why wars are fought and for how long. In the traditional view,
the low-tech approaches of fourth generation warfare are the "tactics of the
weak." However, they have repeatedly been successful in circumventing our
military's far stronger conventional strategy, tactics, and thinking.
Well before the 9-11 attacks al-Qaeda recognized the power
of asymmetric warfare and adaptive tactics for their jihad struggle. An article
entitled "Fourth Generation Wars," in an al-Qaeda affiliated Internet magazine
Al-Ansar: For the Struggle Against the Crusader War acknowledges that 4GW
forms the foundation of al-Qaeda's combat doctrine. In doing so, the author,
Abu 'Ubed Al-Qurashi, reputed to be closely linked with Osama bin Laden, cites
the landmark 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article "The Changing Face of War:
Into the Fourth Generation" as key to understanding contemporary global conflict.
While only a few military analysts both in and out of
uniform recognize the deadly nature of 4GW that recognition still eludes most
political and military strategic discourse. Beyond any doubt, the supposedly
isolated and shadowy strategists and tacticians of the al-Qaeda network understood
the power of 4GW far more than our own military or even 4GW theorists realized.
The aforementioned al-Qaeda on-line magazine made a chilling
declaration: "The time has come for the Islamic movements facing a general
crusader offensive to internalize the rules of fourth-generation warfare."
Rather than al-Qaeda simply being an indicator of the changes within 4GW,
they have knowingly embraced its thesis to become change leaders.
Fourth-generation warfare is not entirely new, but rather
a creative and adaptive application of the past where the "moral" dimension
of war outweighs the technological. 4GW represents warfare in transition where
traditional strengths are bypassed or redefined; the focus is shifted away
from high technology to ideas. Conflict shifts from simply destroying military
targets and regular conventional forces to social-economic or political-cultural
"centers."
When nations try to apply 2GW or 3GW approaches in response,
it typically results in considerable "back blast" as state forces misapply
conventional military means. In essence, 4GW groups attack the entire social
order, and use the target society's very organization, laws, technology and
conventional forces or tactics against itself. 4GW theorists foresaw well
before the 1990s that the United States conceptually was still held captive
to World War I tactics coupled with high technology.
Meanwhile the world was progressing beyond the industrial
age of highly autonomous nation-states. The future (now upon us) was one where
the huge serried ranks of regular armies would be almost helpless against
the scattered, fourth generation gangs, religions, tribes, ideologies and
terrorists. In that analysis, we'd too often try to use precision munitions
from attack aircraft against 4GW "phantoms" or "ghosts"-shadowy groups blended
into existing society without respect to international borders. Our targeteers
are often trying to hit an "enemy" center of gravity that is a shared religious/ideological
goal and message, with our bombs falling short in the end.
War today is no longer a monopoly of the state. War is
changing so that much of our Cold War national security apparatus is being
rendered obsolete or irrelevant. We must adapt-and do so quickly. The problem
we face in Iraq and Afghanistan is no longer executing a conventional high
tech attack on our adversaries' military and government. The conventional
phases went well. Rather, our conundrum is sustaining operations in the aftermath
when the enemy "military" (along with enterprising criminals and trouble makers)
transition into sub-national paramilitary gangs submerged within a society
of politically wavering civilian groups.
In this ambiguous operational space, common purpose and
zealotry replace military equipment and command structure. The old regime's
500-pound airdropped bomb is transformed into a suicide truck bomb or other
improvised explosive devise. The new enemy "pilot" does not return to base
and family but instead fully intends to die as a martyr for the mission. The
target is no longer just our US conventional force, but symbolic icons tied
to our presence.
The chaotic and violent aftermath of grossly inadequate
infrastructure and antagonistic ethnic groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and other
places is providing fertile ground for 4GW tactics. We have won the set piece
"war" in Iraq only to find the original context of a conflict had been fundamentally
ill-defined in very outdated but conventional, nation-state terms. For that
"war," our forces on the ground may have seemed adequate with technology being
the quantum force multiplier. However, we must now come to grips with the
challenges of having limited number of conventional forces with constabulary
capabilities in the post-conventional conflict period. In this irregular warfare
environment, our too regular approach and explanation falls flat.
Today we are faced with interesting dichotomies. Washington
Gadfly William S. Lind notes that we are trying to impose law and order in
Afghanistan and Iraq from Washington, DC, where you can't safely walk 1,000
yards from the Capitol after dark. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are seeing
fourth-generation warfare in play. Images of urban warfare from World War
II, Mogadishu, the Chechen capital of Grozny, and now in Baghdad itself give
pause to those who contemplate US forces remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan
for years to come.
As we write, fourth-generation conflict is rife worldwide.
Iraq, Post-Iraqi Freedom, continues to fester, creating a vision of the gray-area
between war and peace where looting, lawlessness and a policing vacuum challenge
US forces and demonstrate an enormous gap in US preparations for peace. UN
and US personnel and Iraqis are all equally at risk. For example, near-daily
assaults on US, UK and coalition forces have resulted in more deaths post-conventional
conflict than during the "actual" war.
Consider these recent highlights. A 19 August truck bomb
targeted UN headquarters killing 23, including UN special representative Sergio
Viera de Mello, and a 29 August car bombing in Najaf killed over 100 including
a prominent Shi'a leader portending more violence to come. The President has
asked Congress for $87 billion more, demonstrating that the cost of this new
post-conflict "peace" has far outstripped the price of the "war."
Meanwhile, Afghanistan still simmers, and insurgents and
terrorists worldwide threaten US national and global security alike. Africa
is virtually imploding under the specter of continual conflict, an AIDS epidemic
of colossal proportions, child soldiers and communal violence. According to
the International Crisis Group deteriorating security situations exist not
only in Iraq, but in Côte d'Ivoire, India, Indonesia, Kosovo, and Nigeria
to name a few, with current conflicts simmering in Afghanistan, Colombia,
Kashmir, Sudan, Chechnya, and Uganda. A sampling of potential near-term conflicts
that may erupt include Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan, Iran, North
Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, as well as much of Africa
and central Asia.
These conflicts cannot only stimulate or exacerbate the
global terrorist situation, but can serve as catalysts for global criminal
opportunities for networking and profiteering. Obviously, there is no shortage
of threats here and abroad. Ironically, the whole issue of homeland security
and defense is at times like an apple bobbing in water while heads are turned
elsewhere.
The bottom line is that no matter how high-tech warfighting
becomes, war is about people and the military and security forces are ultimately
about controlling people. It is not enough to dominate the technological domain.
Precision munitions, air, space, and cyber power are elements of, but not
the entire solution. Having infantry on the ground is what it takes to control
people. You can kill people with bombs, you can use fast moving mechanized
maneuver to bypass population centers, but in the end, you can't influence
or protect the people you want to control without troops-infantry, initially
until supplemented and ultimately replaced by constabulary and civil police
forces-on the ground.
There is currently a gap between active military operations,
stability operations, and peacemaking. Recent experience has shown the power
of special operations and air power. Yet sustaining the advantage requires
rapid deployment of sufficient infantry forces in place long enough to ensure
stability. Once the infantry is in place, constabulary forces are needed to
fill the gap between heavily armed military forces and lightly armed civil
police.
This requires rethinking our current force structure to
potentially include "expeditionary police forces (EXPOL)," similar to French
Gendarmerie or Italian Carabinieri, to fill the military-police gap (not only
suppressing insurgency, but also combating organized crime and criminal profiteering
that flourish in post-war conditions). These options could provide the type
of flexible and tailored contingency structure needed to stabilize the post-conflict
environment. Not only military and security organs are needed, however. Sufficient
civil affairs or non-military structures are needed to manage the days, weeks,
months, and perhaps years after the conventional war.
Gaining ground is not enough. It must be held. Developing
such constabulary and civil organs was a lesson well learned by the US and
Great Britain in the past. The USMC Small Wars Manual, and the British Colonial
Service provide useful historical reference for post-modern conflict managers
seeking to stabilize the conditions that breed 4GW.
Once military dominance is achieved and solidified by
the infantry, it must be maintained through skillful integration of the military,
civil, judicial, diplomatic, intelligence, and police services. Together,
these services must work toward the objective of building a sustainable civil
society from the ashes of politically unstable and chaotic 4GW gray areas.
Skillful use of people and human skills are a more powerful multiplier than
technology when seeking to nurture a civil society.
To be sure we need to exploit technology to make the job
of the infantry easier and safer. Infantry forces are just as essential as
intelligence and special operations forces in meeting the challenges of the
future. In our quest to transform our military to meet the threats of the
21st century, we must not lose sight of the fundamental importance of having
adequate infantry on the ground and the need to link them with appropriate
partners.
Finally, we must implicitly recognize the value of placing
people and ideas ahead of "technology" to truly win wars. Otherwise, fourth
generation tactics of the weak will continue to confound the second-generation
tactics of the strong.
© 2003 G.I. Wilson. All opinions expressed in this article are
the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
G.I. Wilson is a retired Marine Corps Reserve colonel
with over 30 years of military service and 7 years combined civilian law enforcement
and emergency services experience. He is widely published and has appeared
on TV in documentaries and as a military analyst.
John P. Sullivan is a member of the board of directors
for the Terrorism Research Center. He specializes in terrorism, urban operations
and conflict studies. He is also a sergeant with a major Southern California
law enforcement agency, where he coordinates counterterrorism efforts.
Hal Kempfer is a Marine Reserve Lieutenant Colonel, and
a civilian consultant in strategic risk management and competitive intelligence.
He has a long background in expeditionary military operations, civil-military
programs and antiterrorism. See the
KIPP Website.
Chuck Spinney
"A popular government without popular information,
or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or
perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean
to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge
gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material
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