Fourth Generation Warfare

I was reading William Lind's opinion piece (FMFM 1-A) at Military.com when I was intrigued by the term Fourth Generation Warfare. He makes two points:

First, past is prologue; Marines who face war waged by entities other than states are encountering armed conflict as it was before the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which gave states a monopoly on war. Second, because the root of 4GW is what the FMFM calls "a political, social and moral revolution, the decline of the state," it can have no purely military solution.

On the Defense and National Interest web site, there is an article about Fourth Generation Warfare.

A premise of 4GW is that the world itself has changed, so that terrorism and guerilla warfare—and other elusive techniques that are still being invented—are now ready to move to center stage. These techniques focus not so much on the enemy's military capabilities (although these may be attacked) but directly against the will of the enemy to continue the war. All of the operations by a 4GW force must support this goal. In its most fully developed form, there may be no real "battles" at all, as was virtually the case in the Sandinista take-over of El Salvador in 1979.

I assume the author is talking about the guerrilla movement taking control of the country without becoming a regular force as Mao Zedong had said in his theory of war. As I recall, the success of the Sandanistas was achieved in conjunction with the mass movements within El Salvador. This is something similar to the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

To summarize, fourth generation warfare appears to be evolving along two complimentary lines:

• One of the opponents is something other than the armed forces of a state;
• The focus (Schwerpunkt) of the non-state player's operations is the process, whatever it may be, within the state for deciding to continue the conflict.

In Fourth-generation warfare, the definitions are somewhat clearer:

In a very real sense, all war is driven by politics. The first two generations of war were waged between armies: men and materiel introduced to a battlefield, or onto a front, with the intent to destroy each other, while civilian targets were left alone, for the most part. Third-generation warfare was waged against the industrial structures that made warfare possible: factories, supply lines, and railroad systems, with the opposing military acting as a shield to defend those resources. Fourth-generation warfare is a direct assault on the political structures that guide warfare.

As this article points out, this means terrorism.

What intrigues me about these papers is the idea of the decline of the state. I think what the authors are referring to a nation. That is, a body of people who occupy a certain piece of ground, at a ceratin time in history, with defined boundaries and have a supreme decision making body to control all affairs of that nation. (Definition is very fuzzy). In general, a nation is said to have a common purpose of survival and progress.

In this increasingly globalised world, boundaries are breaking down. Nations are losing the definitiveness of their boundaries and thus, their identity.

If a military force cannot find a nation, then the nation cannot be occupied in order to bend the nation to the will of the military force.

These thoughts need clarification.