Questions and answers about wars in our world

Chet Richards

6 years ago

Summary: Chet Richards is one of the brightest guys I know. His questions contain more insights than a bale of newspapers. Here he poses three questions, followed by a closing note. See my answers; post yours in the comments. This is another in my series of posts trying to provide new perspectives on our world, so that we can better understand and adapt to it.

By Sergey Nivens. AdobeStock – 297027174.

“What role do foreign military forces play in anything resembling 4GW? Other than make the situation worse?”

Foreign military forces have played a big role in most 4GWs since WWII. They play an essential role for any war: the losers.

For more about this, see Why the West loses so many wars, and how we can learn to win.

I define 4GW more narrowly than do 4GW fashionistas today. I expect soon to see my war with cavities described as 4GW by a 4GW expert.

Personally, I think (aka guess) that 4GW will play a smaller role in America’s future than in past 60 years (i.e., we will do fewer foreign expeditions). I suspect that internal disruptions will dominate our politics. We are becoming a low-trust and fractured society. A large fraction of our young men are alienated – ready to join a movement giving them pride, community, and purpose. Our doomsters endlessly predict that crises from America’s past will repeat – but bigger. I believe that the 21st century will bring new threats. Remember, past performance does not guarantee future victories.

“William Lind once wrote that ‘money is the new fire support.’”

An important insight! Perhaps he was quoting William Pitt the Younger, who deployed Britain’s superior finances as a potent weapon against Napoleon – funding not only Britain’s war machine, but also that of Napoleon’s other enemies. Money has always been one of the most powerful forms of fire support in wars.

“They have an abundance of gold and silver, and these make war, like other things, go smoothly.”
— Attributed to Hermocrates (general for Syracuse, fought Athens, d 407 BC).

“War is not so much a matter of weapons, as of money.”
— Paraphrase of Thucydides (d. 400 BC) in his History of the Peloponnesian War.

“Are you following the efforts of organized crime in Europe to exploit the Coronavirus crisis?”

Such as this from CNN: ‘The Mafia is poised to exploit coronavirus, and not just in Italy.‘

No, I haven’t. Will anyone remember any of that two days after this is over? My guess: no.

Chet’s afterword

The term 4th generation warfare was coined in “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation” by William S. Lind et al., published in the Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989 (open copy here). To be worth a new name, 4GW has to be something other than garden-variety insurgency via guerrilla warfare tactics. In the original paper, Lind, et al. added 4GW to a series of ways states confront each other (1GW, 2GW, 3GW), without specifically saying what it would be. They offered a few alternatives. It’s worth noting that TX Hammes also considers 4GW to be a form of warfare that could be state-vs-state, although he characterizes it as “evolved insurgency” – for more info, see page 208 of his The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century.

In a recent post, Lind proposed re-aligning the USMC away from its traditional role of land combat from the sea (glossing over, for a moment, the USMC’s conventional campaigns in Vietnam and Korea) towards 4GW.

So, I’d like to ask: “What role do foreign military forces play in anything resembling 4GW as contrasted with traditional counterinsurgency by outside military forces?” As you, van Creveld, and other have pointed out, this is a mission not extravagantly blessed with success since the end of the Second World War.

As for those considering organized crimes as a form of 4GW, I find it difficult to imagine a role for the USMC in counter-‘Ndrangheta operations {they are one of the largest organized crime syndicates in the world, with origins in southern Italy}.

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About Chet Richards

Ph.D. Mathematics. Colonel, USAF, retired. Long-time editor of the Defense and the National Interest website (archived here), certified yoga instructor (RYT 500, now retired), Fellow of the Lean Systems Society, a colleague of John Boyd, and blogs at Slightly East of New. Chet was an Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Quantitative Methods at Kennesaw St. University in Atlanta, and author of these important books.

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