4GW

The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette back in 1989. Amazingly prescient:

In broad terms, fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" may disappear.

Indeed. Since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" two months ago, at least 74 "coalition" soldiers have been killed, and we're looking at perhaps a decade of occupation. There are no more fronts since the eerie collapse of Baghdad, and we're shooting 11-year-old boys. Yes, this all seems largely undefined.

Here's what George Friedman of STRATFOR, a global intelligence firm, says in a recent newsletter entitled "Guerrilla War in Iraq" (take that, Rummy):

[T]he United States is in a tough spot. It cannot withdraw from Iraq and therefore must fight. But it must fight in such a way that avoids four things:

1. It cannot fight a war that alienates the general Iraqi populace sufficiently to generate recruits for the guerrillas and undermine the occupation.

2. It cannot lose control of the countryside; this could destabilize the entire occupation.

3. It cannot allow the guerrilla operation to undermine its ability to project forces elsewhere.

4. It cannot be allowed to extend the length of the conflict to such an extent that the U.S. public determines that the cost is not worth the prize. The longer the war, the clearer the definition of the prize must be.

Oh good, at least we're not doing anything wrong. Let's see, we're clearly alienating the populace, allowing the guerrilla operation to undermine us, and I hear 5 to 10 years of conflict during the "untidiness" pushing Iraq to democracy will entail (and already a majority of Americans don't think this is "worth it"). Admittedly, I don't know how we're doing on #2, but I vaguely recall stories about how we ignored the countryside (presumably because a good chunk of Iraq's population is urban). Okay, so we're batting .250.

Dr. Friedman goes on:

The centerpiece of guerrilla warfare, even more than other types of war, is intelligence. Knowing who the enemy is, where he is and what he plans to do is the key to stopping him. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese had much better intelligence about these three things than the United States. Over time, despite material weakness, they were able to turn this and a large pool of manpower into victory by forcing the United States to do the four things it should never have done.

Since intelligence is the key, we must consider the fact that this war began in an intelligence failure. The core assumption of U.S. intelligence was that once the Baath regime lost Baghdad, it would simply disappear.

It's not really clear who is attacking our troops. Rummy says it's "looters, criminals, remnants of the Ba'athist regime, foreign terrorists who came in to assist and try to harm the coalition forces, and those influenced by Iran". Quite the laundry list. Despite Operation Sidewinder, our soldiers are still being attacked. It appears not only is our intelligence failing now, but it has been failing us since the beginning. At least we're being consistent.

I think the what bothers me the most is that we outspend the entire world on defense. That's money that could be doing all those nice things we hear about, like feeding the poor, training people for new jobs, paying for health insurance, etc. Instead, we pour hundreds of billions of dollars into new lethal technology. Does that buy us security? Returning to the 4GW paper for a moment, I see:

Technology was the primary driver of the second generation of warfare; ideas were the primary driver of the third. An idea-based fourth generation is also conceivable.

For about the last 500 years, the West has defined warfare. For a military to be effective it generally had to follow Western models. Because the West's strength is technology, it may tend to conceive of a fourth generation in technological terms.

However, the West no longer dominates the world. A fourth generation may emerge from non-Western cultural traditions, such as Islamic or Asiatic traditions. The fact that some non-Western areas, such as the Islamic world, are not strong in technology may lead them to develop a fourth generation through ideas rather than technology.

The genesis of an idea-based fourth generation may be visible in terrorism. This is not to say that terrorism is fourth generation warfare, but rather that elements of it may be signs pointing toward a fourth generation.
...
Even in equipment, terrorism may point toward signs of a change in generations. Typically, an older generation requires much greater resources to achieve a given end than does its successor. Today, the United States is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers. A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk - a car that looks like every other car.

Great. We spend half a billion dollars on planes that don't work in the rain, and terrorists just need a Yugo. Assymetry rears its ugly head again. Not to worry, the DoD has it covered:

* Predator team prowls Iraq - It hunts alone, flying quietly for more than 20 hours at a time, carefully scouring the Earth for the most minute evidence of ground activity and discretely relaying intelligence information to analysts half a world away.

* US-based missiles to have global reach - The Pentagon is planning a new generation of weapons, including huge hypersonic drones and bombs dropped from space, that will allow the US to strike its enemies at lightning speed from its own territory.

* U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System - The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city. Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas. Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans.

Am I allowed to be scared yet?

ntodd  ¶ 7:22 PM