4th Gen War in Iraq

I recently re-read Marine Lt. Colonel T. X. Hammes recent book on the
evolution of modern warfare, The Sling and the Stone. Col. Hammes wrote
an article for the Marine Corps Gazette which is essentially a summary of his book. It lays out the thesis more completely and cogently than I could hope to here. I guess I’m saying if you want the skinny from the horse’s mouth, check out that link; if you don’t mind it from the other end, keep reading.

In
a nutshell, Hammes (along with many other eminent military theorists
and professionals) proposes that war utilizing distributed networks of
military, political, economic, and cultural power, driven by a broadly
accepted ideological focus creates a much different kind of warfare that is capable of overcoming even superior arms and power. Such
networks are empowered by new technologies, but certainly not dependent
upon them, having been used successfully in armed struggle for at least
the last 70 years.

4th Generation Warfare (4GW) forces are
immune to decapitation and disruption of their command and control, resistant
to disruption of logistics (living largely off the land and indigenous
populations), very resistant to intelligence gathering (making SIGINT
and surveillance largely ineffective, and HUMINT much more difficult),
and present little in the way of a strategic targeting profile (recall
Rumsfeld’s infamous comment about Afghanistan lacking good bombing
targets). Technological and social changes have made 4GW strategies
come to maturity, to the point where 4GW forces now regularly overcome
armed opposition organized around 2GW and 3GW strategies – such our own
armed forces, which are the premier iteration of 2GW and 3GW war-fighting.

There
are four issues which Col. Hammes’ work brings up which I feel inspired
to comment and expand upon for anyone who has interest in the topic of
the emergent strategic environment of warfare in the present and near
future. The result is too long for a single post, so I will be posting
these reflections as a series.

I) What
does the maturation of 4GW means for American strategy in current
conflicts? Specifically, what sort of enemy do we face in Iraq and Afghanistan and what
are our prospects for defeating them?

II) How does an understanding of 4GW inform our strategy in the struggle with
Al Qaida and other future transnational terrorist insurgencies?

III) Whether
4GW is similar to 2GW in favoring defense over offense, and whether
5GW, as and when it evolves, will break open the 4GW strategic
environment like the armored maneuver of 3GW did to the static defense
biased battlefields of 2GW?

IV) What does the maturation of
4GW means for large-scale warfare with major nation-state powers? How
should 4GW affect our military doctrine and our global strategy? Will
the future of warfare make protection of civilian populations obsolete
or impossible?

Part I: Iraq

America has only lost wars when facing opponents using 4GW strategies – Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia. And we have never
won a 4GW engagement. We seldom lose battles, however; we only lose
wars. Nothing can overcome our forces in a stand-up fight, but 4GW
strategies still consistently manage to win wars against us. We do not
lose these struggles because our armed forces are not superb and well
equipped. We lose such struggles because the quality of our armed
forces is largely irrelevant to the outcome of these wars. 4GW strategy
primarily targets the ability and desirability of continuing to fight
in the minds of enemy decision-makers. But 4GW is not just propaganda,
it brings to bear an entire suite of psychological, economic,
political, and military assets to the task of breaking the will of the
enemy and convincing key decision makers that the fight is not worth
continuing. As such, 4GW strategies are most powerful in defense
against a occupying or invading enemy, especially one in which the
decision makers are politically accountable to a mass electorate. 4GW
has proven a powerful strategy for populations resisting foreign
incursion.

It is here that theory meets current events. 4GW
strategy allows an asymmetric force to fight a vastly more powerful,
well-equipped, and wealthier occupying force organized along 3GW principles. An enemy
that uses 4GW strategy is exactly what we face in Iraq. The Iraqi people have formed 4GW
networks have sprung up emergently and opportunistically in the vacuum
left by the Baathist regime’s demise.

Military engagement with
the American forces is only part of the function of Iraq 4GW networks,
and not even the most important part. They seek not only to wage war on
American military personnel, but also to defeat American plans for
Iraq’s future by destroying political support for the occupation by
mobilizing political, ideological, economic and cultural forces to
shape the future of Iraq. The many factions within Iraqi society are
now looking beyond the immediate struggle with the American-led
occupation to the struggle for dominance of Iraq. Their strategic
visions do not terminate with an end to the American occupation. This
is one reason why we have been so ineffectual: our strategic vision
essentially ended with the end of “major combat” operations (i.e. the
end of the 3GW engagement), whereas the enemy we now face in Iraq has a
strategic vision that begins where ours ends.

To the extent
that American war planners did plan for the post invasion period, they
made an assumption to that Iraq would be a blank slate to be written
upon anything the neo-con ideologues could dream up. In practice,
nothing could have been further from the truth. The spontaneous 4GW
networks of influence and command which have sprung up following the
war, severely curtailed the execution of America’s hothouse plans that
flourished in the think tanks of Washington but proved unable to survive in
the desert of the real.

The central reason why the Iraqi
insurgency is succeeding is the same reason American plans for the
political future of Iraq have gone so badly awry. The planners of this
war assumed that the only resistance to change would be the antiquated
and ill-equipped 3WG forces arrayed against the initial invasion. Once
that organization was swept aside, they envisioned nothing to prevent
us from creating the Iraq the neo-cons wanted. They ignored the lessons
of history and the emergence of 4GW strategies as an effective means of
defeating superior 3GW forces.

The Bush Administration now
points to the Iraqi constitution, the interim government, and the parliamentary elections, the fragile government huddling in the Green Zone, and the ‘surge’ as evidence of how far we have come.
However, these are all improvisations; they were never part of their
plan. These developments were all more or less imposed upon us by the
4GW political and cultural maneuvering of the mass of Iraqi people. The future of Iraq will not be our choice, and the future state of Iraq will not be our tool; the future of Iraq will be the
creature of those Iraqi networks that have best been able to exploit
4GW strategies to control Iraq despite our occupation.

The Administration’s line
regarding the termination of the occupation, that “we’ll stand down as
the Iraqis stand up,” and that Iraqi’s have to stand up for their own
security, is deeply absurd, though it seems reasonable enough on its
face in its nearly moronic simplicity. The fact is that the 4GW
networks which are now creating Iraq’s sovereign concept of security
are likely to define it largely as security against us. Any
forces that we train will likely never be loyal to any American
approved authority or policy in Iraq, but rather to those 4GW networks
that are able to successfully mobilize Iraq politically and culturally.
We are training not our replacements, but our future enemies.

There
will be no independent Iraqi forces so long as we define independent as
‘willing to follow U.S. commands’. If we really wanted independent
military strength, the Kurdish and Shiite militias would serve
adequately as counter-insurgency forces if properly equipped, trained,
and led; but using these forces looks too much like taking sides in a
civil war. Once again, 4GW strategy ties down Gulliver with a multitude
of threads. The Iraqis are not sitting down on the job, we just can’t
find any Iraqis willing stand up and fight as our proxies. There is no
solution to the problem of creating an independent Iraqi armed force as
the Bush Administration has defined the problem. Even a reasonable
simulacrum of a national force will be a Potemkin army that will come
apart along 4GW network lines at the first crisis.

We are trying
to create stable pro-Western Iraqi national government with a political
process that strongly favors the very 4GW networks we vainly seek to
control. In the end, any reasonably democratic process in Iraq works to
the advantage of every party other than American interests; we do not
have a vote in Iraqi elections, despite all our efforts to rectify that
problem. The history of the 2nd Gulf War will clearly show how we
bulled our way into a situation we didn’t understand, knocked out a
brutal ruling minority, converting it into a violent and repressed
minority, then empowered the majority to remake Iraq in their own
image. The Shiites and the Kurds used their new freedom to create a
base for Kurdish separatism, and a tyrannical Shiite theocracy aligned
with, and strengthening the Iranian mullahs. It was all accomplished by
4GW strategy and tactics that we were essentially powerless to stop,
because we failed to understand the root causes of our impotence in the
face of such foes. Because we lacked an understanding of how 4GW
strategy works, let alone how to fight such a foe. We threw away more
than 4000 American lives, and counting, just to shoot our national interest
in the foot, and make fools of ourselves on the world stage.

If
you step into a dark closet and are suddenly pummeled by unseen
opponents from every side, barely able to defend yourself and
completely incapable of contending with your assailant, “stay the
course” is hardly good advice. That is essentially what has happened to
us in Iraq. Staying in that closet is not going accomplish anything
except provide your assailant with an easy target. We need to get out
of Iraq, use what influence we can from outside of Iraq, and assess how
to retool our military doctrine to contend with and win in the 4GW
strategic environment.

We have never won a war against an opponent using 4GW strategies.
Until we learn how to contend with such enemies, we need to stay out of
the nation-building, regime-changing business lest we have more
expensive and painful debacles like Vietnam and Iraq.