Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict

Debating Fourth-Generation Warfare

Regina Karp, Aaron Karp, Terry Terriff, Regina Karp, Aaron Karp, Terry Terriff, Aaron Karp, Regina Karp, Terry Terriff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415413572
• eBook ISBN: 9781134124145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume covers a timely debate in contemporary security studies: can armed forces adjust to the rising challenge of insurgency and terrorism, the greatest transformation in warfare since the birth of the international system? Containing essays by leading international security scholars and military professionals, it explores the Fourth-Generation Warfare thesis and its implications for security planning in the twenty-first century.

No longer confined to the fringes of armed conflict, guerrilla warfare and terrorism increasingly dominate world-wide military planning. For the first time since the Vietnam War ended, the problems of insurgency have leapt to the top of the international security agenda and virtually all countries are struggling to protect themselves against terrorist threats. Coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are bogged down by an insurgency, and are being forced to rely on old warfare tactics rather than modern technologies to destroy their adversaries. These theorists argue that irregular warfare—insurgencies and terrorism—has evolved over time and become progressively more sophisticated and difficult to defeat as it is not centred on high technology and state of the art weaponry.

Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict will be of interest to students of international security, strategic studies and terrorism studies.

Part I
Introduction

1
The Fourth Generation Warfare debate

Aaron Karp, Regina Karp, and Terry Terriff

We are all strategists now

It was not supposed to be this way. Most countries emerged from the Cold War into an era of unprecedented peace and stability. After the round of fierce, brutal ethnic fighting unleashed by the collapse of the world’s last empire, warfare began a steady decline. Today, traditional warfare, the various forms that preoccupied princes and governments for centuries, is historically distant and geographically remote. Not only do democracies almost never fight each other, virtually no state of any stripe fights another.¹ Armed conflict ceased to mean war and became associated with ever more nebulous events in ever remoter regions. The major use of most countries’ armed forces was helping out others by maintaining the peace. It was not the millennium of prophesy, but for most of humankind, it was pretty good.

Then on September 11 we woke to find that one of those far away nebulous armed conflicts had directly engaged the world’s sole superpower. Afterwards Bali, Madrid, London, and Bombay joined the list of cities subsequently victimized; traditional armed forces seemed increasingly helpless to prevent attack. These were not the threats they were created to repel. Nor were the new adversaries ones that the armed services knew how to defeat. Statistically, humanity currently is safer from the worst dangers of the past four centuries than ever, but a seemingly novel threat left many feeling as insecure as ever. Adding to the confusion, when governments tried to use their armed forces to enhance their own security objectives, the results were frustrating at best, catastrophic at worst. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon became symbols of the ineffectiveness of the world’s most professional armed forces, while less conspicuous conflicts droned on remorselessly.

The new demon has many names, none of them completely satisfactory: insurgency, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, non-state actors, the long war, global war on terrorism (GWOT), and so on and so forth. Fourth Generation Warfare is neither the most elegant nor parsimonious term, but it conveys better than the others the evolving nature of global armed conflict. More so than the other synonyms for post-Cold War fighting, it is a self-conscious critique of the weaknesses of current military and security planning. Unlike the more neutral terms, Fourth Generation Warfare comes with an agenda, simultaneously diagnosing the problems posed by contemporary security dangers and recommending a particular path to overcome them.

This book is both about how we think about those security dangers and how to deal with them. Unlike alternative descriptors, Fourth Generation Warfare is steeped in strategic conceptualization. One of the most immediate effects of the Fourth Generation Warfare debate has been epistemic, accelerating a renaissance in Western strategic thought that had been slowly gathering momentum since the late 1970s.² This process was subtle enough to go largely unremarked, but it is deep enough to affect virtually all thought on the use of force. It has influenced and informed the intellectual debate on the character of war in ways completely unprecedented. Maybe it has not ameliorated the ashen prose of government reports – that would ask too much – but it compelled even bureaucratic efforts to grapple with the fundamentals of armed violence. Only the most passive warriors and citizens are unaware of this trend. Although our talents and insights vary, we are all strategists now, probing difficult questions of military goals and means.

It is a measure of the change that even the recent past now looks incredibly alien. Preoccupied throughout the Cold War by the problems of nuclear deterrence, strategic thought became an intellectual backwater, so much so that the word strategy became a synonym for nuclear, and all other uses of force were – quite literally – “non-strategic.” The efforts of isolated intellectuals helped to sustain an otherwise forgotten field, but their efforts were not enough to foster a broad interest in strategy, much less in its development. In retrospect such exercises seem arbitrary and out of touch with events.

Michael Howard and Peter Paret’s English translation of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, published in 1976,³ reminded military professionals and security analysts of the decline of strategic thought. The book did remarkably well for a dense and incomplete philosophical work of German idealism, but sales undoubtedly benefited most from romantic fascination. It was a book that one was supposed to have read. In retrospect it is obvious that most copies of the fat white volume sat untouched, largely because to most it still seemed irrelevant. Military self-perception offered little room for uniformed intellectuals.⁴ In an era that stressed unity of effort, it was easy to dismiss strategic introspection as doubt. Writers such as Paret and Howard made Western security planners aware of what they were not doing, but they could not actually make them do it. Except for isolated dens of genuine innovation – the US Army’s Training and Doctrinal Command in the late 1970s, and the US Marine Corps University in the mid to late 1980s – security thought concentrated on the problem of maintaining stability, not on anticipating and preparing for change.

Welcome to Fourth Generation Warfare

Only with the end of the Cold War and the weirdness of a world swamped by ethnic conflict were conditions ripe for a return to basics. This was trumpeted by the appearance in 1989 of The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation by William S. Lind, Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson. Although their article received scant attention when originally published, today it ranks with Fukuyama’s End of History and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as an essential guide to post-modern world affairs.

Reproduced here, The Changing Face of War has lost none of its ability to startle. Lulled into confusing strategic thought with debate over the design of the perfect airplane, ship, or tank, far too many of us missed their growing irrelevance. These were merely the artifacts of Third Generation Warfare (maneuver warfare), a form of armed violence that emerged in the twentieth century that has been widely embraced by our military organizations. Major weaponry and procurement politics – the dominant strategic discourse of the Cold War era – actually was anything but strategic. Reaffirmation of old assumptions through a preoccupation with material symbols is a mistake that we cannot afford to make anymore. Emphasizing no particular technologies, but the enormous advantages available to irregular forces preying on the weakness of contemporary society, Fourth Generation Warfare undermines our ability to protect ourselves. Older forms of warfare might continue – they always do – but they would not matter as much.

So long as the attacks on civil society that distinguish Fourth Generation Warfare happened mostly to other people, Western observers could afford to overlook its significance. The Changing Face of War was largely forgotten through the 1990s,⁵ when its implications seemed to mean little more than ever-messier peacekeeping operations or to use the US term, ever-messier ‘military operations other than war’ (MOOTW). Only after September 11 transformed the choice of peacekeeping operations and MOOTWs into the necessity for counter-terrorism, did the menace of Fourth Generation Warfare win broader recognition.

T.X. Hammes has been an important figure in propelling these concepts into the center of Western strategic dialogue. With September 11 and Iraq in the foreground, he had the advantage of audiences whose assumptions about war already were beginning to shake.⁶ Few still confused modern war with the battlefields of the Eastern Front and Okinawa. But what had war become? And how much control did we have over its evolution? On one side of the new debate stood Donald Rumsfeld with demands for military transformation, based on a vision that owed much to the “Revolution in Military Affairs” debate about whether rapid advances in information technology were in the process of changing the nature and character of warfare. But his efforts to assert a template over processes beyond his control only bamboozled listeners who never quite understood what he was talking about. The intense discussion on transforming means did not make sense without a comparable elaboration of goals. In practice this meant finding a suitable enemy, something politically unacceptable and practically impossible. In retrospect the exercise seems arbitrary and wayward. The Secretary of Defense finally connected his war fighting concept to President George Bush’s determination to launch a preventive invasion of Iraq. The result was misleading in the short run and disastrous in the long run.

Hammes came closer than anyone to explaining publicly the new strategic logic.⁷ Summarized here in his essay War evolves into the fourth generation, his interpretation of 4GW is the fulcrum of this volume.⁸ Unlike earlier diagnoses, which tended to fail because they saw strategic change as a goal to be pursued, Hammes understands change as an environmental condition. Instead of leading change, we must struggle to keep up. Like William Lind and his co-writers, Hammes recognized that it was Western militaries and political leaders who were being forced to adapt to pressures imposed by more adroit enemies. But more explicitly than Lind and others, he argues that irregular warriors are evolving even faster due to their better recognition and exploitation of the opportunities afforded by ongoing political, social, cultural, and technological change.

Through the twentieth century, he explains, guerrillas learned to accomplish more and more with less and less. Much more nimble than state military establishments, the irregulars learned much quicker how to tailor the use of force. Crafting their techniques to rely less on actual killing and destruction, the most successful guerrillas and terrorists came to rely more on the political effects of their attacks. What began in the mid-twentieth century with the massive guerrilla armies of Mao Tse-tung ended with Osama bin Laden challenging the world’s sole superpower with an army of hundreds or dozens. The extraordinary power of a carefully designed Fourth Generation Warfare campaign can make tiny bands the equals of great powers and sometimes their masters. Bin Laden may be the one hiding in a Waziristan cave, but we are the ones who are wracking our brains.

It is the critics of Hammes who bring the debate fully to life, as can be seen in Part III. Respondents to Hammes’ argument fall into two general categories. None deny the salience of the techniques of Fourth Generation Warfare, but they disagree about the extent of its advantages and whether it is a decisive change in the use of force. Those who find 4GW claims persuasive worry that existing armed forces will have to struggle for effectiveness. The rituals of classical Westphalian warfare, they maintain, have become a sideshow. State-to-state warfare with its single-purpose armies may continue, but with less frequency and importance. Instead warfare is destined to be shaped more by insurgent-like actors⁹whose methods are easier, more adaptable and no less effective.

The most incisive question is historical insights. They emphasize not the radical disjuncture of a new generation of warfare from the old but the gradual evolution of a guerrilla threat that undoubtedly has existed as long as violent conflict. Far from amounting to something new, they argue, today’s irregular war adheres to ancient patterns and can be overcome through age-old techniques.

The end of unity of effort

The historical critique of Fourth Generation Warfare – stressing the permanence of guerrilla concepts and their antidotes – is undeniable. This explains the continuing utility of studying lessons from past counterinsurgency campaigns and, indeed, furnish cogent reasons for the continuing utility to reflect critically on the history of war and warfare.¹⁰ But it misses equally significant changes in the character of asymmetric warfare and the demands on those who face it. One of Hammes’ greatest insights is that of the differences between today’s guerrilla warfare and earlier manifestations. Through the twentieth century, the practitioners of guerrilla warfare have become more politically astute and more tactically adroit. As a result they have achieved comparable goals with ever smaller forces and thinner external support. Compared to the Spanish guerrilla forces that ravaged Napoleon’s force, the peasant armies of Mao Tse-tung or the Viet Cong, al Qaeda is a mosquito and Hezbollah a sideshow. But shrewd political and cultural insight make Osama bin Laden and Hassan Nasrallah every bit their equals.

For military planners, the Fourth Generation Warfare critique emphasizes both a shift in the predominant forms of warfare and evolutionary development of its effectiveness. Seen from this point of view, the rise of insurgency is not temporary or secondary but pe...

Table of contents

• Routledge global security studies
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The re-discovery of Fourth Generation Warfare
• Part III Evaluating Fourth Generation Warfare theory
• Part IV Fourth Generation wars
• Part V The implications of Fourth Generation Warfare
• Part VI Conclusion
• Index