Lind writes in the Fourth Generation War Manual of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps:
Much of what Marines now face in Fourth Generation wars is simply war as it was fought before the rise of the state and the Peace of Westphalia. Once again, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions and gangs are fighting wars, in more and more parts of the world.
I’m no military historian, but this viewpoint always seemed to me to be a) obvious and b) wrong. Perhaps I came of age in that post-Cold War period when Fourth Generation warfare (4GW) was simply the face of war – and certainly the big ticket wars of that time, the Great Lakes and Yugoslav wars, fit the description – but it seemed clear that the sort of war that is now described as Second and Third Generation warfare was long gone. By 1991, in fact, that sort of warfare already seemed archaic, something that you would read about in history books rather than actually attempt to wage.
So yeah, Lind seems kind of obvious here, in the same way as Hobsbawm seems when he talks about the 20th Century lasting from 1914-1991 – not obvious in a “well, duh” way, but obvious in a “thank god somebody else noticed, and isn’t that a useful way of looking at things” way.
I missed out on military history, but I did study contemporary history, and in particular a whole heap of African history. So while Lind’s statement seems obvious, it also seems wrong, because a brief glimpse through the annals of post-WWII African history reveals a glaring absence of Second and Third Generation warfare. It’s all 4GW all the time, baby. Other parts of the world tell a similar story, since most of the proxy wars between the USA and USSR were easiest to sustain at the 4GW level, with some heavy artillery thrown in and the occasional weak-ass air force. Maneuver warfare in eastern Congo? Unlikely.
If this is true, it raises a difficult question for the “standard” history of warfare from First to Second to Third to Fourth Generation. You don’t have to be John Gray to be suspicious of such a smooth narrative, particularly when it emnates largely from the Kings of Narrative, our American friends. American political history perhaps more than any other country is one in which the narrative is paramount for the sense of national identity – where most national histories are primarily the result of historical contingency, of pragmatic adaptation to external and internal shocks, American history was spun equally out of whole philosophical cloth.
Suspicions multiply when Lind talks (with caution, admittedly) about importing 4GW techniques – via the physical presence of the military – to fight gang crime on the streets of American, on the basis that gang tactics are essentially identical to insurgency tactics.
Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.
The last four sentences are all narrative reinforcement, by the way, but I thought they were worth keeping in. Lind is wrong about the essential point here (and I would argue wrong in his conclusions as well). While their tactics may look similar (in the sense that there’s a limited range of possible criminal activity in any society, so it inevitably looks familiar), gang culture in the United States is primarily the result of the failure to sustain the narrative of the US – another, different symptom of this failure can also be seen in the political schisms in the US that have grown up since the turn of the millenium – and we can argue about why that narrative is failing another time.
By contrast insurgency culture in other countries is not just a response to the failure of the state’s narrative – for example, in Afghanistan. That reduces the narrative to a response to a dominant state narrative, which might seem natural to those of us who come from countries where a dominant state narrative, but is not true in many places; and to reduce it so also reduces the agency of insurgents to mere reaction. That is sometimes the case, but we need to recognise that insurgency culture presents a successful narrative in its own right in a way that street gang culture does not. So the two are not identical, they are flip sides of the same narrative coin, which means they need to be addressed differently – although in both cases the importance of establishing alternative narratives is paramount.
Back to my original point – the difficult question for the “standard” history of warfare is whether that narrative fits the facts. My answer is no. The standard history presented by Lind and others is a) Eurocentric and b) militarocentric,1 primarily an attempt to define a coherent narrative which justifies both the military and the ends to which the military is directed. Any group that didn’t buy into the post-Westphalian consensus on how war would be conducted – and that includes pretty much everybody who wasn’t a European state and who didn’t take their cues from the European states, which is to say pretty much everybody in the world – was rolling like they used to roll, all 4GW all the time, baby.
Does this make much difference to the work of Lind and others to help the military to adjust to 4GW? Not especially – although their historical interpretation might be a bedtime story to reassure the military that they weren’t wasting their time, the direction in which they’re going is absolutely the right one.2 The real question is whether a state-based military can really be “successful” in 4GW terms in a situation where the very idea of the state has lost its currency – and that seems to me very doubtful.
p.s. H/T to John Robb for hosting William Lind‘s work on his website. I count that as a public service.