The Crisis of 4GW

Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) was formulated in the late 80's by a maverick group of strategic thinkers, most prominent among them military reform advocate and maneuver warfare strategist William S. Lind. 4GW represented the idea of war as a evolutionary process, with conflict evolving in a dialectic of technology, tactics, and social change, with four successive generations of war.

Granted, these were not entirely rigid, as actors could employ multiple versions at the same time (hence the idea of the US being stuck in an attrition paradigm before FM 100-5 Operations and the advent of maneuver war), but there was a general teleological loop.

4GW is a form of conflict that blurred the line between soldier, civilian, and gangster, waged by a blizzard non-state actors against a declining state that had lost its monopoly on force. In such an environment, actors revert to primary loyalties and legitimacy is the coin of the realm. The battlefield is essentially omnidirectional--the front line is not just "over there" but very much "over here." Terror attacks, psychological operations, propaganda, and even cyber attacks--any kind of asymmetric force--are deployed to depress the will of the opponent.

Before 9/11, 4GW was very much the concern of a small group of thinkers. It went against the guiding current of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Transformation. But after 9/11, it became popular because it categorized the amorphous mass of non-state threats (terrorists, gangs, insurgents, religious fanatics, etc) in a manner that more careful theories could not. Exacting critiques of 4GW's assumptions and historical heritage by military historians such Antulio Echevarria and Sir Laurence Freedman could not replace this explanatory function.

Like the stateless adversaries 4GW described, it has always been amorphous. It intersects with my frequent collaborator Lt. John P. Sullivan's theories on gangs and criminal insurgency, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt's theories of social netwar, and John Robb's Global Guerrillas. Martin Van Creveld, despite the fact that he has never used the term "4GW" provided much of the theoretical heft for 4GW's emphasis on the decline of the state in his book The Transformation of War.

Speculations about a "Fifth Generation" of war also emerged in 2005. 5GW--at least in the consensus conception described in Dreaming 5GW--focused on a mode of future conflict that involved widescale societal and strategic manipulation. Other conceptions of 5GW focused on large-scale WMD terrorism and global insurgency against the West. 5GW also was tied into the emerging field of writings about "super-empowered individuals" using technology, mass psychology, and systems disruption to target brittle human social systems.

Needless to say, every successful theory eventually runs into significant problems. 4GW, correct on the formation of an Iraqi insurgency, failed to predict the emerging consensus engineered by the complex mixture of American strategy, Iraqi factional battles, and the interplay of regional actors such as Iran and Syria. A common definition of 5GW--as well as real world case studies--remains out of reach. And the price for moving towards a non-state paradigm of war has been the overestimation of the insurgent's power and an automatic assumption of the network's vitality against the hierarchy.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious problems involved in current theory has been the insistence on one future--a Mad Max world of neo-feudal anarchy--as the result of the decline of the state. I am now more agnostic about whether the state is in decline at all--it is more likely that we lack the conceptual tools to describe the evolutionary or devolutionary process currently going on as a result of state change. It is undeniable that nasty actors have been empowered, but these are side effects of a process that we still barely understand. Are states hollow and criminal-states emerging? Yes. But do we really know about what that means for the state system?

I'm not saying that we should step away from 4GW--it is still an excellent heuristic for conceptualizing non-state actors and conflict in a national security world that is just beginning to move away from state-centric paradigms. But we should treat it--like any other theoretical paradigm--with skepticism and try to evaluate war without making extreme assumptions (such as the idea that inter-state war is finished). 5GW is so vague that it may be impossible to salvage. That being said, there are elements from it that were certainly of theoretical value to conceptions of propaganda, politics, and future conflict that should not be thrown out with the bathwater.

Labels and definitions are important, as are theories to conceptualize and generalize disparate events. But a focus on rigid genealogies of conflict ruins the practical and explanatory value of military-political theories. By now its probably a blogosphere cliche to talk of the Boydian "snowmobile" approach, but it needs to be emphasized again and again that the solution is going to be a eclectic combination of disparate elements from many theoretical lineages. Dealing with emerging threats and world problems is a messy process of adaptation, challenging assumptions, and taking risks. Only then can we begin to build an engine for "vitality and growth."

Comments

[Smitten Eagle]

I'm not willing to write any postmortem on 4GW yet. Many seem to think that it's still emerging (including Lind & Hammes)

5GW? Ha! I'll be happy to write a pre-mortem on that stillborn mass, however!

[A.E.]

SE, this isn't a postmortem, just a recognition of a problem. It is, however, a postmortem of 5GW.

[Arherring]

Adam, I'm with you on the presumed decline of the state. I also think the root of problem with 4GW thinking is that thinkers are seeing 4GW every time they see insurgency and I don't think that is neccessarily true.

As for 5GW. I don't know if it is ready for a post-mortem. I do think it suffers from me-tooism and too much assumption that the enemy will have every advantage (hence 5GW theories based on WMD, fundamentalism and Super-empowerment). I have always approached 5GW from the premise that it will be the counter to 4GW and that it will naturally be the tool of the state (or non-state actors who find advantage in the existence of the state) to promote stability.