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The Free Congress Commentary On War #79 Corruption In The Corps? By William S. Lind In an earlier column, “Two Marine Corps,” I alluded to the increasing corruption I see at Quantico and in Headquarters Marine Corps. A number of Marines have asked me what I meant by that. Are Marines taking envelopes of money under the table? Are defense contractors flying them to Vegas for free weekends of poker, booze and floozies? Well, floozies are usually a big draw with Marines, but that is not the kind of corruption I am talking about. Even most Congressmen know better than to take money under the table; it is much safer to wait until they retire, then get paid off by the interests they served, often with well-remunerated positions on boards of directors. The corruption I had in mind is more subtle, and perhaps also more dangerous. It is corruption of institutional purpose. When I first came to Washington in 1973 to join the staff of Senator Robert Taft, Jr. of Ohio, I assumed naively that our armed forces defined themselves in terms of winning battles, campaigns and wars. Senator Taft thought that is what they should be about, which is why working for him was both a pleasure and an honor. But I quickly discovered that for three of the four, victory was defined less in military than in bureaucratic and political terms. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force had already lost sight of their institutional purposes. What they were about, at senior levels, was selling programs and getting money from Congress. Whether the program had any relevance to war was not important, so long as it sold. My wake-up call came when the Navy approached the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which Senator Taft served, with a request for $1.4 billion (in 1974 dollars) for a nuclear-powered “Strike Cruiser.” Senator Taft and I had the same response: How do you fight the Soviet Navy, which was largely a submarine navy, with nuclear-powered cruisers? The Navy had no answer, and Taft led the fight to kill the program. The ship was never built, and the Navy has hated me ever since. At that time, and for many years more, up until the mid-1990s, there was one service that stood out as an exception to the corruption of institutional purpose: the Marine Corps. At all levels, including the most senior, the Marine Corps was still about war, not money. When I began writing on maneuver warfare in 1976, Marines of every rank were interested. They weren’t quite sure what I was talking about – there was then very little literature in English on the evolution of German military doctrine – but if it pertained to war, they felt they should learn. That joint effort of civilians, Marines, and Air Force Colonel John Boyd culminated in the adoption of maneuver warfare as the Marine Corps’ official doctrine when Al Gray became Commandant. Sadly, the Marine Corps is no longer an exception. As has long been true with the other services, now, if you talk about war at Quantico or HQMC – especially Fourth Generation war, the kind of war Marines are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan – you are neither right nor wrong, you are simply irrelevant. Fourth Generation war does little to justify programs and increase budgets, so it is not of interest. The “real world” is the world of budget politics, not war. As I said, this type of corruption, corruption of institutional purpose, is subtle. Few Marines, or soldiers, sailors, or airmen for that matter, ever make an explicit, conscious choice to become corrupt in this way. They merely accept the rules of the game as given and play by them, and that is all it takes. As members of hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations, they have been encouraged since their first day at OCS to play by the rules. Thinking about whether those rules were valid was “above their pay grade” – and still is, even when they become generals. Ironically, corruption of institutional purpose was one of the reasons the Soviet Union fell. It is inherent in socialism, because it is a natural tendency of government bureaucracies. Absent an annual balance sheet that shows either black or red ink, there is little mechanism to keep an institution’s focus on the outside world where its intended purpose lies. A friend of mine who holds a senior position in the Pentagon gives a briefing around the building in which one slide says, “The Pentagon now controls the world’s largest planned economy.” No one blinks. It is fair to say that the American armed forces are now little more than the Soviet refrigerator industry in odd-looking green or blue suits? With individual exceptions, at senior levels and in major headquarters, I think it is. There, the only difference I now see between the Marine Corps and the rest is that the Marines’ dysfunctional refrigerators are somewhat smaller. On War #78 The 9/11 Commission Report: Reorganization, Not Reform By William S. Lind When bureaucracies fail, one of their favorite ways to deflect demands for reform is to offer reorganization instead. That appears to be what has happened in the report of the 9/11 commission and Washington’s response to that report. Worse, the reorganization envisioned is to further centralize intelligence by establishing a national intelligence director and creating a counterterrorism center. One is tempted to ask, if centralization improves performance, why didn’t the Soviet Union (“democratic centralism”) win the Cold War? What American military and national intelligence really require is that bureaucratic anathema, reform. And reform in turn means not centralization and unification, but de-centralization and internal competition. What did us in both on 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq war was an intelligence process that valued committee consensus and internal harmony above the open rough-and-tumble disagreements that surface new ways of looking at things. The de-centralization American intelligence requires, if it is to grapple with Fourth Generation threats, must occur on both a micro and a macro level. On the micro level, we need to create layers of competition within and between our national and military intelligence agencies, including CIA, DIA, the FBI and the NSA. The process should be reformed so that end users, policy-makers, get not a single, consensus assessment, with all dissenting views sanitized, but a summary of the disagreements as well as agreed points. The policy-makers, in turn, need to be able and willing to explore the disagreements themselves, rather than simply deferring to “the experts” and their compromise consensus. Such an approach offers far greater promise of creating awareness and understanding in a type of war that is new to us. Unfortunately, it has virtually no chance of happening. The intelligence agencies themselves, like all bureaucracies, hate airing dirty linen. Doing so offers policy-makers a look inside the agency itself, which in turn invites demands for further freeform. Like the military services, the intelligence agencies want to offer policy-makers a single, agreed option, coupled with the message, “Everything is fine with us, except we need more money.” The policy-makers, in turn, are mostly elected politicians who avoid making decisions and taking responsibility. What they want from our intelligence agencies is an agreed consensus they can use to cover their own backsides politically. If they go along with the consensus and the result is disaster, they can say, “Blame it on those guys. We just acted on what they told us.” But if they get competing estimates they have to actually think about, they end up responsible for the final decision and its outcome. So, in the end, both the politicos and the bureaucrats have common interest in giving the nation reorganization, not reform. That makes the outcome 99% certain. What about the macro level? Sadly, the picture is equally bleak. Much Fourth Generation war in America will be most visible on the local level, where people quickly see things that are out of place. The question is what happens to that information. If it must be funneled through layer upon layer of bureaucracy until it finally reaches Big Brother in Washington, it will not be acted upon in time. Worse, Big Brother will see into the local level, which means he will want to control the local level. We will end up with the worst of both worlds, ineffective tyranny. The key to dealing with manifestations of 4GW on the local level is to keep it local. That, in turn, requires community police: cops who walk a beat in one neighborhood, which they get to know very well. We happen to have a good Federal program to train and create more community police, called the Police Corps. What has happened to that program since 9/11? Every year, its budget gets cut more, to the point where it may soon be squeezed out of existence. The money all goes to Big Brother, the centralized, Washington-based Department of Homeland Security. At the heart of our inability to reform instead of merely reorganize and further centralize our national intelligence is the crisis of the state itself. The state cannot reform because reform endangers the money and power of the New Class, which controls the state and feeds richly off its decay. As we will see in Washington’s response to the 9/11 commission report, the public is decoyed by puppet shows while the old games continue. And non-state, Fourth Generation enemies, who unlike the New Class really believe in something beyond themselves, will hit us again and again. Remember, government bureaucracies don’t get more money and more power when they succeed, but when they fail. With an incentive system like that, it is fairly obvious what the rest of us are going to get more of: the consequences of intelligence failures. On War #77 Civil War In Iraq? By William S. Lind Observers continue to ask, “Will Iraq descend into civil war?” The answer is that civil war is already underway in Iraq. Most people do not see it, because it is not following the Sunni/Shiite/Kurd fault lines on which we have been lead to focus. As is usually the case in war, we are the victims not of deception but of self-deception. In Iraq’s civil war, the most prominent faction is what America calls Iraq’s “government.” It is, of course, not a government, because there is no state. The “government’s” goal is to recreate an Iraqi state and become a real government. What are its chances of success? At the physical level, the “government” is undoubtedly the most powerful faction in Iraq’s civil war. It has more money and more troops than any competitor. It also has the U.S. military behind it, as we have seen recently in Fallujah, where the Iraqi “government”: has approved and even provided intelligence for recent American air strikes. But at the moral level, the Iraqi “government” is probably the weakest faction, weaker even than the elements still fighting for Saddam. The reason is that it is an American creation and puppet – a Quisling regime, formed and propped up by a now-hated invader. If it is to have any hope of legitimacy, it must cut the strings to the American puppeteer. So far, it shows no ability to do that. Its one serious effort to date has been to hint at some sort of amnesty for anti-American resistance fighters, a move that could help split its opposition. But that move was stopped cold by the United States, in a way that demonstrates to Iraqis and the world who is really in charge. According to the July 18 Cleveland Plain Dealer:
Not only does that let the puppet strings show like chemlights, it also renders any amnesty meaningless, since it does not apply to the people who are doing the fighting. Fourth Generation war theory suggests that the Iraqi “government’s” strength at the physical level and weakness at the moral level means it has already peaked. Physical strength plays its greatest role early, while the moral level works most powerfully over time. As has been true ever since Saddam fell, time is on the side of America’s enemies, and time is a powerful ally. What are the other factions in Iraq? Both the Sunnis and the Shiites appear to be splitting into smaller, mutually hostile elements. There are indications that among the Sunnis, the secularists, who are mostly Baathists, and the Islamists are starting to go at it. Several secularist militias recently made a public announcement that they want the head (severed or otherwise) of al Qaeda’s local rep, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Shiite leader Muqtada al Sadr’s recent war with the Americans had less to do with resisting the occupation than with positioning himself within the Shiite community. Fourth Generation theory says that once the fractioning begins in a post-state region, it continues. The resulting civil war may still have Sunni vs. Shiite aspects; in fact, it is almost certain to include that fault line. But there will be many other fault lines as well, some within the Shiite and Sunni communities, some cutting across them. At the physical level, this works to the “government’s” advantage, in that its relative power increases. But at the moral level, virtually all the other factions have greater legitimacy than the “government.” And just as the strategic level trumps the tactical, so the moral level trumps the physical. That is one of John Boyd’s more important insights into the nature of war. Not all King George’s bombers nor all of his men can put Mesopotamia’s Humpty together again. Since Sen. Kerry’s policy on Iraq differs from President Bush’s by only the finest of nuances, it is safe to predict that a future King John would fare no better. On War #76 4GW In The Sudan By William S. Lind The international goo-goos (Tammany Hall’s old name for the “good government” types) need their humanitarian crise du jour, and the Sudan currently fills the bill. The usual celebrities are wringing their hands and we are all supposed to care, deeply. The realist replies, ”Yea, that’s life in the global village,” but realism is out of fashion these days. Sense, it seems, has been defeated by sensibility. But there is more to events in the Sudan than the usual starving children. A recent article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer offered a peak at Fourth Generation war at work in some ways both new and very old. After noting that more than a million people have been turned into refugees in just 16 months — not a trivial military result — the paper wrote:
In these few sentences, we take a journey through war over the last five thousand years. It begins with a modern overlay, in the form of bombing by aircraft. Terrorizing tribesmen by bombing their villages from the air was a technique pioneered by the British in their post-World War I fight with insurgents in Iraq. It has the advantage that tribesmen seldom have much in the way of air defenses, other than to get up and move. In the Sudan, that seems to be just what their enemies desire. Of course, the involvement of aircraft suggests the involvement of the Sudanese government. But the rest of the Plain Dealer’s brief account quickly moves us beyond, or more precisely, back from the age of the state. Those gun (muzzleloaders? flintlocks?) and sword-wielding militiamen are almost certainly tribesmen. Not only are their horse and camel-charges something out of past centuries, so is their primary loyalty. It is safe to say that their ties to the government of the Sudan are tenuous. They are fighting for their tribes, against other tribes they have fought for generations. As the state recedes, it reveals once again the old human landscape, almost unaltered and ready, like winter wheat under the snow, to spring to life again and flourish. Another ancient cause of war, race, also presents itself. The attackers are Arabs, the refugees are Negroes. How long have those two been going at it, with the blacks almost always getting the worst of it? In the Sudan, even today, that “worst” includes black slavery. Of course, as is also true throughout history, the alternative to slavery is death. An old Russian proverb comes to mind: Life is terrible, but death is not so great either. Finally, to complete a two-paragraph journey back to history’s dawn, the mounted attackers are herdsmen while the victims are farmers. The Navahos could tell us something about that one, as could the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians and the Chinese. One cannot help but wonder if in addition to their swords and guns those horsemen are good shots with a bow? We see here in this remarkable vignette one of the most important, most powerful and also most unremarked features of our age: the past is all coming back. As modernity crumbles, all ancient ways and causes of war return, defining a Fourth Generation that is also a vast Minus One Generation. I have said from the outset that the Fourth Generation marks the end of modern war and the modern age, and nowhere do we see that more clearly than in places like the Sudan (and there are more and more such places). Those who have eyes, let them see. On War #75 The October Surprise? By William S. Lind Shortly before I left Washington for the summer (in the good old days whose passing I regret, few stayed in Washington in summertime), my informal intelligence network gave me an interesting report: Iran was beginning to mass troops on the Iran-Iraq border. Did this portend overt Iranian intervention in Iraq? I said I didn’t think so. Events in Iraq are not unfavorable to Iran, and the risks of direct intervention would be great. However, there is a potential situation that could lead to Iranian intervention: if it were in response to an American-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Such an attack may very well be on the agenda as the “October Surprise,” the distraction George Bush desperately needs if the debacle in Iraq is not to lead to his defeat in November. There is little doubt that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, one that is operating under forced draft to produce a nuclear deterrent as quickly as possible. Iran, along with everyone else in the world, knows that the best way to be safe from an American attack is to have nukes. Even the most howling neo-cons show little appetite for a war with North Korea. The problem is that, while an Iranian nuclear capability may be directed at deterring the United States, it also poses a mortal threat to Israel. Israel is not known for sitting quietly while such threats develop. It is a safe bet that Israel is planning a strike on known Iranian nuclear facilities, and that such a strike will take place. The question is when. If Israel plans to act this year, the Bush Administration may see a political opportunity it cannot pass up. At the very least it is likely to endorse the Israeli action, and it may well participate. So long as the neo-cons remain in power, Washington is little more than a suburb of Tel Aviv. And, in the Islamic world at least, an American disassociation from any action by Israel would not be believed. Israel and America are now perceived as one country. The question becomes, how would Iran respond? It might shoot some missiles at Tel Aviv, but absent at least “dirty bomb” or bio-engineered warheads, that is not likely to accomplish much. A far better response lies right next door: attack the Americans in Iraq. America has about 130,000 troops in Iraq, a formidable army by local standards. But their disposition makes them vulnerable. Confronted by a guerilla war, they are spread out in penny packets all over the country. If Iran could mass quickly and use effective camouflage and deception to conceal at least the scope of its concentration, then suddenly attack into Iraq with two or three corps, we could face a perilous situation. Iranian success would depend heavily on how Iraqis reacted, but if Iran called its action “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” promised immediate withdrawal once the hated Americans were beaten and waved the Koran at Iraqi Shiites, it might win the cooperation of Iraq’s resistance movement. That would make American efforts to concentrate all the more difficult as convoys would come under constant attack. Logistics would quickly become a nightmare. Such an action would be perilous for Iran as well. The danger with threatening a nuclear power with conventional defeat is that it may go nuclear. America might choose to do that through its Israeli surrogate or, on the theory that the bigger the crisis the stronger the “rally around the President” syndrome, directly. Either way, Iran would have no effective response. But the mullahs now running Iran are, like Mr. Bush, in a steadily weakening political position. If they did not respond powerfully to an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, they might well lose legitimacy with the hard-line base they now depend on. It is risky to count on them doing nothing, and they have few opportunities to do anything that would be effective. Unfortunately for us, their best chance lies right next door, and the party favor has our name on it. This October could be full of surprises. On War #74 Spillover By William S. Lind How are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to look at what is happening in Saudi Arabia. Until about a year ago, Saudi Arabia was one of the safest countries on earth. Crime was rare, and everyone, including Americans, was secure almost anywhere in the kingdom. In a world where the most important distinction will increasingly be that between centers of order and centers of disorder, Saudi Arabia was a center of order. That is no longer true. War has come to Saudi Arabia, Fourth Generation war waged by Islamic non-state forces. Battles are almost a daily occurrence. Foreigners, on whom the Saudi oil industry heavily depends, are frequent targets for assassination. A number of incidents suggest the Fourth Generation forces have penetrated Saudi security forces – not surprising in a strict Islamic country where the non-state elements represent an even stricter Islam. They have the moral high ground. In Washington, the “bouffesphere” whispers nervously about Saudi Arabia’s future. It is obvious that the trend-line is not favorable. When will the House of Saud fall? What will replace it? Will the cheap oil on which America depends continue to flow? Schemes abound – send the Marines to “secure” the oil fields and exporting facilities, impose democracy (including, of course, Feminism) on the Saudi monarchy, give Mecca and Medina back to the Hashemites – but the debacle in Iraq effectively makes it impossible for us to act elsewhere. Plus, invading the homeland of Wahhabism would make Iraq seem like a walk in the park. What Washington cannot understand is that the crumbling of Saudi Arabia is part of the war in Iraq, and that in Afghanistan as well. We still think of wars as delineated by state boundaries, because we still envision a world made up of states. Non-state forces such as al Qaeda use a very different map. Their map has no state boundaries on it; they only think of the dar al Islam, the Islamic world, and the dar al harb, the world of war. For them, our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is an invasion, not of two countries, but of the dar al Islam. Their response can come anywhere, with equal validity; it is all one “battlespace,” to use the U.S. military’s latest buzzword for battlefield (an historical question: do all failing militaries change their terminology frequently?). Their actions in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Europe and North America are all one. Reacting to what we do in one state with actions in another is no different from, in conventional war, counterattacking in the south when your opponent attacks in the north. Like the Washington Establishment, al Qaeda also believes in “one world.” If we use our enemies’ map, it is difficult not to conclude that we are losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to increasing instability in Saudi Arabia, we see General Musharaf tottering in Pakistan, President Mubarak of Egypt flying to Germany for “back surgery” (is that diplomatic-speak for terminal cancer?), Islamic militancy rising in Europe, and who-knows-what in the way of terrorist incidents being prepared in the United States itself. All of these play in the Afghan and Iraqi wars, no less than car bombs in Baghdad and ambushes outside Kandahar. It is all one war, one battlefield. State boundaries mean nothing. Of course, it is not going very well on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But in this war, events in those places are in effect merely tactical. The strategic centers of gravity are in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Al Qaeda, I think, understands this. Washington does not. That fact alone suggests we have only seen the opening moves in what promises to be a very long war. On War #73 The Canon, continued By William S. Lind This column, the third in a series, concludes a discussion of the canon, the seven books which, read in the order given, will take the reader from the First Generation of modern war through the Fourth. As one Marine Corps captain, an instructor at The Basic School, said, “Unless the guy’s a rock, he can’t read these books in the right order and not get it.” The fifth book in the canon is again by Robert Doughty, the head of the History Department at West Point and the best American historian of the modern French army: The Breaking Point. This is the story of the battle of Sedan in 1940, where Guderian’s Panzers crossed the Meuse and then turned and headed for the English Channel in a brilliant example of operational art. Here, the reader sees the Second and Third Generations clash head-on. Why does the Third Generation prevail? Because over and over, at decisive moments the Third Generation Wehrmacht takes initiative (often lead by NCOs in doing so) while the French wait for orders. What the French did was often right, but it was always too late. The sixth book in the canon is Martin van Creveld’s Fighting Power, the second-best book by this brilliant Israeli military historian. While The Breaking Point contrasts the Second and Third Generations in combat, Fighting Power compares them as institutions. It does so by contrasting the U.S. Army in World War II with the German Wehrmacht. What emerges is a picture of two radically different institutions, each consistent with its doctrine. This book is important because it illustrates why you cannot do what the U.S. military is now attempting, namely combine Third Generation, maneuver warfare doctrine with a Second Generation, inward-focused, process-ridden, centralized institution. If you are a Marine, the next time the MAGTF Staff Training Program (MSTP) visits your unit, you might want to throw a copy of Fighting Power at them – hard. The seventh and final book in the canon is van Creveld’s finest work to date, The Transformation of War. Easily the most important book on war written in the last quarter-century, Transformation lays out the basis of Fourth Generation war, the state’s loss of its monopoly on war and on social organization. In the 21st century, as in all centuries up to the rise of the state, many different entities will fight war, for many different reasons, not just raison d’etat. Clausewitz’s “trinity” of people, government and army vanishes, as the elements disappear or become indistinguishable from one another. Van Creveld’s term for what I call Fourth Generation war is non-trinitarian warfare. He subsequently wrote another book, The Rise and Decline of the State, which lays out the historical basis of the theory in Transformation. These seven books constitute the canon. But there is one I am tempted to add, for naval audiences; Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game. The canon is based on land warfare, but the same elements we see in the First, Second and Third Generations also exist in naval warfare, although their development follows different patterns. In the second half of the 18th century, the Royal Navy developed and institutionalized Third Generation war – then loses it again in the 19th century. The Rules of the Game explains how and why they lost it. At the heart of the matter lies signaling, and the illusion that advances in signaling permit effective centralization – a point of some relevance today as our military services drown in a tsunami of computers and video screens. It is a point Gordon does not miss. As I said at the outset, what the canon (plus Gordon) offer is an intellectual framework, a construct the reader can use to make sense of events and discern larger patterns in them. There can, of course, be other frameworks, although I would urge caution toward those based on simple technological determinism (on that, see van Creveld’s Technology and War). But without a framework of some sort, both history and current developments in war tend to appear chaotic. Soldiers as well as scholars need a framework if they are to make sense out of the world around them. The canon offers the best framework I know. The Canon By William S. Lind The last column laid out the basic framework of the Four Generations of modern war. Here, we pick up with a discussion of “the canon,” the seven books which, read in the order given, will take the reader from the First Generation through the Second, the Third and on into the Fourth. The first book in the canon is C.E. White, The Enlightened Soldier. This book explains why you are reading all the other books. It is the story of Scharnhorst, the leader of the Prussian military reform movement of the early 1800s, as a military educator. With other young officers, Scharnhorst realized that if the Prussian army, which had changed little since the time of Frederick the Great, fought Napoleon, it would lose and lose badly. Instead of just waiting for it to happen, he put together a group of officers who thought as he did, the Militaerische Gesellschaft, and they worked out a program of reforms for the Prussian army (and state). Prussia’s defeat at the battle of Jena opened the door to these reforms, which in turn laid the basis for the German army’s development of Third Generation war in the 19th and early 20th century. When I taught a course on the Four Generations at Quantico a few years ago, my students, Marine captains, said that of all the books in the canon, they liked this one best. The next book is Robert Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster. This is the definitive history of the development of Second Generation warfare in the French army during and after World War I. This book is in the canon because we learned modern war from the French, absorbing Second Generation war wholesale from them (as late as 1930, when the U.S. Army wanted a manual on operational art, it just took the French manual on Grand Tactics, translated it and issued it as its own). Every American officer to whom I have lent my copy has told me when he returned it, “This is us.” The Seeds of Disaster is the only book in the canon that is something of a dull read, but it is essential to understand why the American armed forces act as they do. The third book, Bruce Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics, is the story of the development of Third Generation war in the German army in World War I. It is also a book on how to change an army. Twice during World War I, the Germans pulled their army out of the Western Front unit-by-unit and retrained it in radically new tactics. Those new tactics, which are still largely new to American units today (how many American platoon leaders or company commanders have ever done a three-element assault?), broke the deadlock of the trenches, even if Germany had to wait for the development of the Panzer divisions to turn tactical success into operational victory. Book four, Martin Samuels’s Command or Control?, compares British and German tactical development from the late 19th century through World War I. Its value is the clear distinctions it draws between the Second and Third Generations, distinctions the reader will find useful when looking at the U.S. armed forces today. The British were so firmly attached to the Second Generation – at times, even the First – that German officers who had served on both fronts in World War I often said British troop handling was even worst than Russian. Bruce Gudmundsson argues that in each generation, one Brit is allowed really to understand the Germans. In our generation, Martin Samuels is that Brit. I will conclude this discussion of the canon in my next column. On War #71 The Canon And The Four Generations By William S. Lind In my last column, I referenced “the canon,” the seven books which, if read in the correct order, take the reader from the First Generation of modern war through the Second and Third Generations and into the Fourth. A number of people responded with requests for a description both of the canon and of the Four Generations, so here goes. The First Generation of modern war began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War. It also marked the state’s assumption of a monopoly on war; thereafter, war became something waged by states, for raison d’etat, with state armies and navies doing the fighting. The First Generation ran from 1648 to about the time of the American Civil War, and it was characterized, on the whole, by a battlefield of order. The battlefield of order created a military culture of order, which endures to this day. And there’s the rub. For around the middle of the 19th century, the battlefield of order began to break down. Ever since, state militaries have had to grapple with a growing contradiction between their internal culture of order and the external reality of an increasingly disordered battlefield. The Second and Third Generations represent two different approaches to that problem. Second Generation war was developed by the French Army during and after World War I, and is best summed up with the French saying, “The artillery conquers, the infantry occupies.” Also known as firepower/attrition warfare, Second Generation war maintained the First Generation culture of order. Decision-making was centralized and hierarchical; orders were detailed and controlling, to permit synchronization of all arms; time was not particularly important; and success was measured by comparative body counts. Second Generation armed forces focus inward on methods, processes and procedures, prize obedience over initiative (initiative and synchronization are not compatible) and depend on imposed discipline. The American Army and Marine Corps learned Second Generation war from the French during the First World War and still practice it today, with exceptions based on individual commanders. Third Generation war, also known as maneuver warfare, was developed by the German Army in World War I; by 1918, Blitzkrieg was conceptually complete, lacking only the tanks necessary for operational mobility. The Prussian/German roots of Third Generation war go back earlier, to the Scharnhorst reforms that followed Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon. One of those reforms changed what was required of a Prussian officer; instead of being responsible for obeying orders, he became responsible for getting the result the situation required regardless of orders (in 19th century war games, it was common for junior Prussian officers to be given problems that could only be solved by disobeying orders). This in turn created a military culture that was focused outward, on the enemy, the situation and the result the situation demanded instead of inward on rules, orders and processes. In effect, Prussia had broken with the First Generation culture of order. The new Third Generation tactics developed by the Germans in World War I were the first non-linear tactics. On the defense, the objective became sucking the enemy in, then cutting him off, rather than holding a line. On the offensive, the attack flowed like water through the enemy’s defenses, always seeking the weakest point to penetrate, then rolling him up from his own rear forward. Operationally as well as tactically the goal was usually encirclement. Speed replaced firepower as the most important tool, and dislocation, mental as well as physical, was more important than attrition. Culturally, not only was the German Army outward-focused, it prized initiative over obedience and it depended on self-discipline rather than imposed discipline. Much of the American military reform movement of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s was an attempt to move the American armed forces from the Second to the Third Generation. While the Marine Corps formally adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the 1990s, most of what the Marine Corps does remains Second Generation. The other American services remain almost wholly Second Generation, to the frustration of many junior officers. Fourth Generation war is the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia, because it marks the end of the state’s monopoly on war. Once again, as before 1648, many different entities, not states, are fighting war. They use many different means, including “terrorism” and immigration, not just formal armies. Differences between cultures, not just states, become paramount, and other cultures will not fight the way we fight. All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing. State militaries were designed to fight other state militaries like themselves, and against non-state enemies most of their equipment, tactics and training are useless or counterproductive. The canon, the list of seven books that lay all this out in detail, will be the subject of my next column. On War #70 Two Marine Corps By William S. Lind Since sometime before Caesar was a lance corporal, the United States Marine Corps’ greatest fear has been becoming “a second land army.” It has long believed that if the country perceived it had two armies, it would require one to go away, and that one would be the Marine Corps. It is therefore ironic that the United States now finds itself with not one, but two Marine Corps, and the final result may be that both disappear. Almost any Marine knows the two Marine Corps of which I speak. One is the heir of the maneuver warfare movement of the 1970s and 80s, of Al Gray and Warfighting, of free play training, officer education focused on how to think, not what to do, of the belief that the highest goal of all Marines is winning in combat with the smallest possible losses. This is the Marine Corps that led the advance to Baghdad in the first phase of the ongoing war in Iraq. It is also the Marine Corps that recently “fought smart” in Fallujah by not taking the city. The other Marine Corps’ highest goal is programs, money and bureaucratic success “inside the Beltway.” Its priorities are absurdities such as the MV-22 “Albatross” and reviving the 1990s “Sea Worm” project under the label “distributed operations,” which are referred to openly at Quantico as “putting lipstick on a pig.” This Marine Corps is anti-intellectual, sees the First Generation culture of order as sacred, believes that sufficient rank justifies any idiot and regards politics, not combat, as the “real world.” Regrettably, in the war between these two Marine Corps, the second one is winning. I recently encountered a horrifying example of its success at the Marine Corps Command & Staff School at Quantico. At the end of this academic year, the Command & Staff faculty simply got rid of 250 copies of Martin van Creveld’s superb book, Fighting Power. This book, which lays out the fundamental difference between the Second Generation U.S. Army in World War II and the Third Generation Wehrmacht, is one of the seven books of “the canon,” the readings that take you from the First Generation into the Fourth. It should be required reading for every Marine Corps and Army officer. When I asked someone associated with Command & Staff how such a thing could be done, he replied that the faculty has decided it “doesn’t like” van Creveld. This is similar to a band of Hottentots deciding they “don’t like” Queen Victoria. Martin van Creveld is perhaps the most perceptive military historian now writing. But in the end, the books went; future generations of students at Command & Staff won’t have them. A friend who attended the last Marine Corps General Officers’ conference reported the same division between the two Marine Corps. The officers from the field, he said, had completely different concerns from those stationed in Washington. They were ships passing in the night. But it is the interests of the Washington Marine Corps, not those in the field, that determine Marine Corps policy. And that policy is affected little, if at all, by the two wars in which Marines are now fighting. Throughout my years as a Senate staffer, the Marine Corps’ clout on Capitol Hill was envied by the other services. The Marine Corps then had little money and not much interest in programs. Its message to Congress and to the American public was, “We’re not like the other services. We aren’t about money and stuff. We’re about war.” That message brought the Corps unrivalled public and political support. In the mid-1990s, the Marine Corps changed its message and, without realizing what it was doing, abandoned its successful grand strategy for survival. The new message became, “We are just like the other services. We too are now about money and programs.” And that new message is what now dominates Headquarters Marine Corps and Quantico. Thinking about war is out; money and stuff is in. In effect, the Marine Corps has sat down at the highest-stakes poker game in the world, American defense politics, with 25 cents in its pocket. It simply cannot compete with the Army, Navy or Air Force at buying Congressional and public support. But it is determined to try. If the dumb (and increasingly corrupt) “Washington” Marine Corps finally triumphs over the smart, Warfighting Marine Corps, in the end both will disappear. And that will be a shame, because the smart Marine Corps, Al Gray’s Marine Corps, really had something going. It was on its way to becoming the first American Third Generation armed service. Maybe Martin van Creveld’s next book should be The Rise and Decline of the United States Marine Corps. On War #69 Psyops In Fourth Generation War By William S. Lind I recently received an invitation to speak at a conference at Ft. Bragg on psychological operations, or psyops. Regrettably, a schedule conflict prevented me from accepting, but the invitation got me thinking: what are psyops in Fourth Generation war? It is clear what they are not: leaflets saying, “No on can hope to fight the American military, surrender now,” or “We are here to liberate you.” After the Iraq debacle, those messages will be met with open derision. The only way such leaflets are likely to be useful is if they are printed on very soft paper. Colonel John Boyd said that the greatest weakness a person or a nation can have at the highest level of war, the moral level, is a contradiction between what they say and what they do. From that I think follows the basic definition of psyops in Fourth Generation war: psyops are not what you say but what you do. If we look at the war in Iraq through that lens, we quickly see a number of psyops we could have undertaken, but did not. For example, what if instead locating the CPA in Saddam’s old palace in Baghdad and putting Iraqi prisoners in his notorious Abu Ghraib prison, we had located the CPA in Abu Ghraib and put the prisoners in Saddam’s palace? That would have sent a powerful message. What if, when we get in a firefight and Iraqis are killed, General Kimmitt the Frog, our military spokesman in Baghdad, announced that with regret instead of in triumph? We could use every engagement as a chance to reiterate the message, “We did not come here to fight.” That message would be all the more powerful if we treated Iraqi wounded the same way as American wounded, offered American military honors to their dead and sent any prisoners home, quickly, with a wad of cash in their pockets. Years ago, my father, David Lind, whose career was in advertising, said, “If the day World War II ended, Stalin had sent all his German prisoners home, giving them a big box of food for their families and a wallet full of Reichsmarks, the Communists would have taken all of Western Europe.” He may have been right. In Fallujah, the Marines just showed a brilliant appreciation of psyops in 4GW. How? They let the Iraqis win. At the tactical level, the Marines probably could have taken Fallujah, although the result would have been a strategic disaster. Instead, by pulling back and letting the Iraqis claim victory, they gave Iraqi forces of order inside the city the self-respect they needed to work with us. Washington and the CPA seem to define “liberation” as beating the Iraqis to a pulp, then handing them their “freedom” like a gift from a master to a slave. In societies where honor, dignity and manliness are still important virtues, that can never work. But “losing to win” sometimes can. The CPA’s complete inability to appreciate psyops in 4GW was revealed in a recent episode that suggested Laurel and Hardy are in command. It seems our Boys in Baghdad decided the “new Iraq” needed a new flag. Never mind that the new flag suggested Iraq is still a province of the Ottoman Empire and also conveniently included the same shade of blue found on the Israeli flag. What giving any new flag to Iraq’s Quisling government in Baghdad really did was give the Iraqi resistance something it badly needed – its own flag, in the form of the old Iraqi flag. Couldn’t anybody over there see that coming? Hello? Perhaps our most disastrous failure (beyond Abu Ghraib) to realize that psyops are what we do, not what we say, is our ongoing fight with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. At the beginning of April, Sadr had almost no support in the Shiite community outside Baghdad’s Sadr City, while Ayatollah Sistani, who has passively cooperated with the occupation, had overwhelming support. Now, thanks to our attacks on Sadr and his militia, polls taken in Iraq show Sadr with more than 30% support among Shiites while Sistani has slipped to just over 50%. The U.S. Army has been Sadr’s best publicity agent. Maybe it should send him a bill. Some of our psyops people probably understand all this. Unfortunately, the people above them, in Iraq and in Washington, appear to grasp none of it. The end result is that, regardless of who wins the firefights, our enemies win one psychological victory after another. In a type of war where the moral and mental levels far outweigh the physical level, it is not hard to see where that road ends. On War #67 Work For The Grossgeneralstab By William S. Lind In 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom history has underrated, told his Chief of the General Staff, von Moltke the Less, that he wanted to remain on the defensive in the West and take the offensive in the East, against Russia. Such a reversal of the Schlieffen Plan would probably have won the war for Germany. France would have bled to death throwing bodies against bullets in Elsass and Lothringen, England would have remained neutral, at least for a while, and Russia would have gone under in a couple years. Unfortunately for Germany and for history, von Moltke Jr. collapsed in a fit of nerves and said it couldn’t be done. In fact, the plans for just such a campaign were in the file. They were there because it was the job of the General Staff to make plans for every contingency. The disastrous course of America’s war in Iraq has created a new task for the Great General Staff, in the form of more contingency planning. America needs to make sure it has a plan in the file for a fighting withdrawal from Iraq. It is still possible the end may not come this way. We may still manage a shaky hand-off to a U.N.-designated Iraqi government, and that government might last long enough for us to withdraw with some shreds of dignity. George W. might awake some morning a new man, announce he was swindled, sack the neo-cons and bring in someone like Marine Corps General Tony Zinni, who opposed the war all along, to handle our disengagement. The Archangel Michael might appear over Mecca and convert all the Mohammedans to Christianity. But the growing probability is that we will be driven out of Iraq by a general uprising, an intifada in which every American will be the target of every Iraqi and our boys (and, in America’s Neo-Model Army, girls) will have to fight their way out in a scene like that which faced Gordon in the Sudan. It is not a pleasant prospect. It means thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of American and “coalition” casualties, many times more Iraqi casualties, and one of history’s more memorable defeats, right up there with Syracuse, Waterloo and Stalingrad. The after-shocks will be severe, as regimes tumble from Pakistan through the Persian Gulf and Egypt to Britian and America itself. You can look forward to seeing the Dow at 3000, if not 300. Facing such a contingency, we can have only one priority: the lives of our troops. Their chances of making it out alive will be far greater if we have done some planning beforehand. Our great vulnerability is that our lines of supply, communication and retreat are long, and they almost all run through hostile territory. Most lead through southern Iraq to Kuwait, and that is not likely to be a comfortable way out. North through the Kurds to Turkey may be the best bet, although as Xenophon can attest, retreating with a beaten army through Kurd country is no picnic. West lies Syria, no friend, and Jordan, which may itself be convulsed. One great snare and delusion lies in our path: the notion that we can always go by air. Already the Air Force is saying that if the southern supply lines are cut, as they were in the first half of April, air transport can fill the gap. Right, just as Goering promised the troops in Stalingrad. Not only does that assume American and coalition troops can hold the airports, is assumes they can get to the airports, which at the moment is problematic just between Baghdad and its airport. Worse, coups in places such as Saudi Arabia could see Islamic-flown F-15s and F-16s shooting down American C-5s and C-17s. A Second Generation military such as America’s does not improvise well under time pressure, at least at the higher levels, where vast staffs drilled to Kadavergehorsamkeit in the sacred “staff planning process” are slaves to procedure. The neo-cons in the Bush administration and their toadies in the Pentagon will no doubt howl if the military starts contingency planning for a forced withdrawal. Listen up, guys: do it anyway. You don’t have to tell them. Just make sure the plan is in the file. This time, the military may have to play the Kaiser when the Bush administration falls prostrate on the couch. On War #66 Iraq’s WMD Factory By William S. Lind As America’s civilian and military high command comes unglued, American actions in Iraq grow more inchoate. The Marines did what needed to be done in Fallujah, turning the place over to one of Saddam’s generals who might be able to run it, mainly because he comes from the tribe that has always run it. The pathetic CPA, aka the Emerald City, bleated that they had not “vetted” him and named another Iraqi general in his place, forgetting that anyone the Americans “vet” is thereby labeled “collaborator.” We continue to encircle Najaf, which is dumb, and the Iraqi resistance has again cut the road from Baghdad to the airport, which is dangerous. One suspects that a fly on the wall in meetings in the White House or in Baghdad’s Green Zone thinks it has wandered into a low-budget production of Marat-Sade. But what of the world beyond Iraq? That is where one sees the full effect of Iraq’s factory of WMDs – Wars of Mass Destruction. The State Department has just told all Americans to leave Saudi Arabia, while they can still get out alive. Over a hundred people are dead in Thailand, where local Islamics are waging a new jihad. Moslems and Christians are going at it again in Indonesia and Nigeria. The Israelis, beaten in Gaza as they were beaten in Lebanon, find it impossible to move either forward or back. Pakistan, whose army got it’s a-- handed to it by tribesmen on the old Northwest Frontier, is turning a deaf ear to increasingly desperate demands from America’s generals in Afghanistan for “tough action.” President Mubarak of Egypt warns from his tottering throne that America has never been so hated in the Middle East as it is now. Each day’s newspapers make the same point: in the misnamed “War on Terrorism,” America is losing and losing badly. Osama & Company are having a banner year. The reason is not any brilliance on their part, but gross buffoonery on ours. Specifically, the invasion and occupation of Iraq by America have created the greatest recruiting drive in history – for the other side. Not content with so modest an achievement, the Bush administration has tossed its (expensive) cigar into the powder magazine by embracing Israel the way Russia once embraced Serbia. Not only did Bush endorse Mr. Sharon’s de facto annexation of much of the West Bank, when Sharon’s own party voted against him on Gaza and thus gave Bush a way out, he reiterated his support of Likud and its policies. Apparently, not even the gods’ rarest gift, a golden bridge across which to retreat from a blunder, is of interest to an administration that has sealed itself off from reality. It is however, somewhat unfair to blame the whole bloody mess on George II. The entire Establishment is in this together. All Mr. Kerry can do is say “stay the course;” Congress is silent on the whole business; few in the media have the courage to state the obvious, which is that we need to bring the troops home, now. Only old Ralph Nader, playing the crocodile to Kerry’s Captain Hook, has the guts to call for an American withdrawal from Iraq. In an election where the choice may be between Tweedledumb and Tweedlephony, Ralph is starting to look pretty good, even to Russell Kirk conservatives like myself. When the full scope of America’s defeat in the Wars of Mass Destruction ignited by Iraq becomes apparent, the political result is likely to go far beyond any election, especially an election in America’s one-party Republicrat state (you get two candidates, but they both represent the same thing.) We are likely to see that interesting time known by historians as “change of dynasty,” where a defective and corrupt Establishment is all swept away. Now that could be fun to watch. On War #65 Back From The Brink? By William S. Lind Last week, the Americans in Iraq stood on the brink of not one but three cliffs. Now, in what appears to be a sudden attack of sanity, they have pulled back from the edge of two. The first was the American threat to assault the holy Shiite city of Najaf in order to "capture or kill" militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr. When the most powerful man in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani, said "Don't do that," the CPA in Baghdad had the good sense to listen. Now it appears we may hand off the "coalition" military presence in Najaf from the (wisely) departing Spaniards to the Brits, rather than keeping American troops camped just outside the city gates. If that happens, it would be another smart move on our part, as the British are rather better at dealing with the natives than we are. It would be comforting to have adults in charge, at least at Najaf. The second precipice was the plan to renew the assault on Fallujah. At the end of last week, the Marines were making no secret of their preparations to go back on the offensive and take the whole city, cost what that may. The U.S. military's spokesman in Baghdad, Army Brigadier General Mark "Kermit" Kimmit, sounded a bit like old Saddam himself when he said, "Whether [an opponent] is somebody who is trying to defend their city...or somebody who's just out to kill an American, both of those will find the full force of the United States Marine Corps and the coalition brought down on them" (Washington Post, April 24). That sounds like "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out," which is not entirely consistent with "liberation." Suddenly, and again wisely, we have backed off. Instead of threatening to turn Fallujah into Stalingrad, we are once more talking to Iraqi leaders in the city and proposing joint patrols. One of the Marines' commanders, General Mattis, was quoted in the April 26 Post saying, "We didn't come here to fight." That is how the Marines trained to handle Fallujah, by de-escalation. Finally, it looks as if the CPA may allow them to do it. In both Najaf and Fallujah, the threat is not what happens in the city. It is what happens in the rest of Iraq, and the rest of the world, if we continue to play the bully. Fallujah has already become for many Iraqis what the Alamo is for Texans. Shiites have joined Sunnis in its defense. The Sunday New York Times quoted a spokesman for the Iraqi Muslim Clerics Association saying, "We're living in beautiful days of solidarity between people. We need to thank our enemy, the Americans. They helped us carry out our dream." That dream is our nightmare, an intifada against the occupation throughout Arab Iraq. When American actions help bring that about, it is time for a change of course. While we have stepped back from two brinks, we remain poised on a third. That is the current plan to turn Iraq over on June 30 to an Iraqi government that is sovereign in name only. According to the April 26 Washington Post, "U.S. officials made clear last week that the transitional government would have limited powers, with no authority to write new laws and no control over U.S. military forces that would continue to operate in Iraq. Any "government" that cannot control foreign forces operating on its soil is not sovereign. Worse, a situation where U.S. forces continue to police Iraq holds America down in its present quagmire, with violence and casualties rising. There are two ways America can leave Iraq. The first is at the request of a genuinely sovereign Iraqi government. What America needs is for the Iraqi government that takes over at the end of June to ask us to reduce our troop numbers, move the troops that remain far away from Iraqi population centers and then, after an interval measured in months, not years, leave. That is the best outcome we can hope for, although it means the end of the neo-con dream of an Iraq that is a "new" satellite of both America and Israel. The second way the war in Iraq can end is with the Americans and other "coalition" forces driven out. Last Friday, President George W. Bush said, "America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers." But that is exactly what will happen if we continue fighting the Iraqi people. It is to avoid that end to the war that we must not attack Fallujah, Najaf, or any other Iraqi city that dares to want its freedom from a now widely-hated occupation. Will our present sanity attack continue, allowing the U.N. to install a genuinely sovereign Iraqi government on June 30 and thereby give us a graceful way out? Or will we revert to type, renew the assault on Fallujah, perhaps try an Israeli-style "assassination by Apache" of Muqtada al-Sadr and demand that we continue to control Iraq after the end of June? A bon mot from the summer of 1914 again comes to mind: In Berlin, the situation is serious but not hopeless; in Vienna, it is hopeless but not serious. At the moment, some of our commanders in Iraq are playing Berlin, while George W. sounds like Conrad von Hoetzendorf. Which will prevail? The next week may tell us. On War #64 Why We Get It Wrong By William S. Lind One of the few consistencies of the war in Iraq is America’s ability to make the wrong choices. From starting the war in the first place through outlawing the Baath and sending the Iraqi army home to assaulting Fallujah and declaring war on Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, we repeatedly get it wrong. Such consistency raises a question: can we identify a single factor that consistently leads us in the wrong direction? I think we can. That is not to say other factors are not also in play. But one wrong notion does appear to underlie many of our blunders. That is the belief that in this war, the U.S. military is the strongest player. We hear this at every level from the rifle squad to the White House. In Fallujah, Marine privates and sergeants want to finish the job of taking the city, with no doubt whatsoever that they can. In Baghdad, spokesmen for the CPA regularly trumpet the line that no Iraqi fighters can hope to stand up to the U.S. military. Washington casts a broader net, boasting that the American military can defeat any enemy, anywhere. The bragging and self-congratulation reach the point where, as Oscar Wilde might have said, it is worse than untrue; it is in bad taste. In fact, in Iraq and in Fourth Generation war elsewhere, we are the weaker party. The most important reason this is so is time. For every other party, the distinguishing characteristic of the American intervention force is that it, and it alone, will go away. At some point, sooner or later, we will go home. Everyone else stays, because they live there. This has many implications, none of them good from our perspective. Local allies know they will at some time face their local enemies without us there to support them. French collaborators with the Germans, and there were many, can tell us what happens then. Local enemies know they can outlast us. Neutrals make their calculations on the same basis; as my neighbor back in Cleveland said, one of Arabs’ few military virtues is that they are always on the winning side. All our technology, all our training, all our superiority in techniques (like being able to hit what we shoot at) put together are less powerful than the fact that time is against us. More, we tend to accelerate the time disadvantage. American election cycles play a role here; clearly, that is what lies behind the June 30 deadline for handing Iraq over to some kind of Iraqi government. So does a central feature of American culture, the desire for quick results and “closure.” Whether we are talking about wars or diets, Americans want action now and results fast. In places like Fallujah, that leads us to prefer assaults to talks. Our opponents, in contrast, have all the time in the world – and in the next world for that matter. Time is not the only factor that renders us the weaker party. So does our lack of understanding of local cultures and languages. So also do our reliance on massive firepower, our dependence on a secure logistics train (we are now experiencing that vulnerability in Iraq, where our supply lines are being cut), our insistence on living apart from and much better than the local population. But time still overshadows all of these. Worse, we can do nothing about it, unless, like the Romans, we plan to stay for three hundred years. Until we accept the counterintuitive fact that in Fourth Generation interventions we are and always will be the weaker party, our decisions will continue to be consistently wrong. The decisions will be wrong because the assumption that lies behind them is wrong. We will remain trapped by our own false pride. What if we do come to understand our own inherent weakness in places like Iraq? Might we then come up with some more productive approaches? Well, the Byzantines might have something to teach us on that score. Greek fire notwithstanding, what kept the Eastern Roman Empire alive for a thousand years after Rome fell was knowing how to play weak hands brilliantly. On War #63 “Your Fish, Sir” By William S. Lind In the twelve-course meal that is the war in Iraq, America has just been served the first entree. The fight with Iraq’s state armed forces was merely the amuse-bouche. The subsequent guerilla war with the Baath, as distasteful as we found it, was still just the appetizer. Over the past two weeks, we have been presented with the first of the main courses, Fourth Generation war waged for religion. If, as is traditional, this is the fish course, our reaction suggests it is flounder. Frankly, I was surprised how quickly this dish arrived. It seems Mohammed’s kitchen is working rather more speedily than usual. While a broadening and intensifying of the anti-American resistance was inevitable, I did not think it would reach its present intensity until this summer. The fact that is has erupted so early has political as well as military implications. The full scope of our disaster in Syracuse – er, sorry, Iraq – may be evident before the party conventions, as well as prior to the fall election. Might Bush do an LBJ and choose not to run? Will a Kerry who voted for the war be a credible nominee? Military disaster can displace all sorts of certainties. It is not yet a disaster, some may say. On the tactical level, that is true, although it may not be true much longer. But on the strategic level it is not just one disaster, it is four:
So what comes next? The current violence may follow a sine wave, ebbing and then flowing again, with the whole curve gradually trending up. Or, it may rise in a linear, accelerating curve, in which case we will soon be driven out of Iraq, possibly in a full-scale sauve que peut rout. The former appears more likely, but it still leads to the same ending, if taking a bit more time to get there. Unlike traditional twelve-course dinners, this one does not finish with a dessert or a savoury. It ends, to borrow one of John Boyd’s favorite phrases, with the “coalition” getting the whole enchilada right up the p--- chute. You cannot get anything you want at Mohammed’s restaurant. On War #62 The Fourth Generation Seminar, Continued By William S. Lind As regular readers of this series know, I periodically report on the results from the Fourth Generation seminar, a small, informal group of military officers – modeled on Scharnhorst’s Militaerische Gesellschaft – that meets at my house to work on the problem of Fourth Generation warfare and how American forces might fight it. The seminar is moving toward writing its own field manual on Fourth Generation war, along the lines of the excellent manuals on maneuver warfare produced by the Marine Corps when General Al Gray was Commandant. Our most recent meeting was devoted to discussing what such a manual might say. The Fourth Generation Seminar, Continued From the beginning, the seminar has stressed the practical aspects of fighting 4GW over the theoretical. Theory is of course important, but soldiers and Marines in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan need ideas they can put to use. However, this meeting of the seminar did focus on theory, for a good reason: theory needs to shape the basic outline of the prospective field manual, the outline into which practices will be fit. In such a project as this, getting the outline right is both the hardest and the most important task. Once that is done well, the book almost writes itself. The seminar’s thinking immediately took a radical turn: unlike other field manuals, this one needs to start with a grand strategy. The reason is that if, as is not unlikely in this new form of warfare, the civilian policy makers get the grand strategy wrong at the outset, any efforts the military may make are doomed to failure. The seminar did not contest the fact that civilians will set the grand strategy. But as the minutes from the meeting state, the manual should discuss grand strategy in Fourth Generation war:
Integral to the manual’s discussion of grand strategy must be John Boyd’s concept that war is fought at three levels, the physical, the moral level and the most powerful. In Fourth Generation war, as historically in guerilla warfare, grand strategy must include the moral dimension – indeed, must make it primary. A major challenge to Fourth Generation theory, one that the manual must address, is the conundrum that what works for you at the tactical and physical levels often woks against you at the moral and grand strategic levels. This is one of the lessons from Israel’s war against Fourth Generation Islamic forces in Gaza and the West bank. To quote again from the minutes of the discussion, especially at the moral and grand strategic levels:
As the seminar noted, the latter is a tough challenge for America when our number one export is garbage culture. Finally, the seminar revisited its ongoing discussion of two models, the “escalation model” and the “de-escalation model.” It was generally agreed that success in Fourth Generation war comes not from escalation, but from de-escalation. However, the discussion this time led us away from seeing these as opposites to visualizing them as a continuum. In a Fourth Generation war in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq, American forces might simultaneously be de-escalating against some local elements while escalating against others. The seminar did not by any means finish laying out the theoretical framework for a useful Fourth Generation FMFM, but I think it made some progress. We have delayed the next meeting until late April, in hopes of having some feedback from Marine units recently sent into the Sunni triangle in Iraq. In the meantime, each member of the seminar will work to develop his own outline for the prospective field manual. Contrasting efforts usually yield a better final product than do premature attempts to reach a consensus (that’s another of John Boyd’s rules). As the seminar continues its work, I will keep you updated on the results in future columns. We like to think the spirit of Scharnhorst is hovering nearby. On War #61 The Battle That Wasn’t By William S. Lind About two weeks ago, the world’s attention suddenly turned to a dramatic battle in Pakistan. The Pakistani Army, we were told, had trapped a large force of al Qaeda, including a “high-value target,” possibly Ayman Zawahiri. The Pakis brought in artillery and air power. The fate of the al Qaeda fighters was sealed. Then the whole thing evaporated into thin air. First, Zawahiri wasn’t there. Then no other “high-value target” was there either. The Pakistani Army invited local tribal elders to mediate, declaring a cease-fire while they did so – not the sort of thing you do when you are winning. Pakistani Army units elsewhere in the tribal territories came under attack. Finally the whole business just dropped out of sight, ending not with a bang but a whimper. What really happened? At this point, if anyone knows they are not telling. But that is not the important question. The important question is, what didn’t happen? What did not happen is that a force of irregulars – maybe al Qaeda, maybe Taliban, certainly local tribal fighters – was trapped by a state military and beaten. That is a very significant non-event. Normally, non-state irregulars cannot stand against state armed forces. Once they are located and pinned down, the state armed forces can use their vastly superior firepower to win an easy and guaranteed victory. They just keep up the bombardment until those left alive have little if any fight left in them (remember, these irregulars are not exactly the German Army at the Somme). Here, the firepower was employed. The Paki Army used both artillery and attack helicopters. But it did not win. If it had won, you can be certain Islamabad would be trumpeting the victory. The fact that the battle became a non-event says that the forces of the state of Pakistan did not win. What does this failure mean? The Washington Post quoted a retired Pakistani Army general as saying, “The state has to win this battle or its credibility will be destroyed.” I suspect the general is correct. In fact, I will go further: I think the failure of the Pakistani Army to win this battle marks the beginning of the end for Pakistan’s current President, General Musharraf. The defensive victory of the tribal fighters will turn into an offensive victory, giving courage and a sense of inevitable victory to Musharraf’s enemies while causing near-revolt in Musharraf’s base, the army itself. Before the year is out, I suspect we will see General Musharraf’s head impaled on a pike and surging Pashtun crowds proclaiming Osama as their leader. At that point the American strategic failures that are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have transformed themselves into an American strategic disaster. As I have said before in On War, Iraq and Afghanistan themselves mean little. The centers of gravity in this war are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What is important about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is how they affect these other countries and their pro-American governments. Our friends in the Middle East have warned us that the spillover effects are not likely to be positive. That has now proven to be the case. The Pakistani Army went into the Tribal Territories – something it has long known is not a good idea – under American pressure, as part of the current American “big push” in Afghanistan. In effect, the American generals in command in Afghanistan made the typical German mistake: they sacrificed the strategic situation to benefit their operational plan. As did the Germans, we will find that blunder tends to win the campaign at the price of losing the war. Meanwhile, adding insult to injury, the putative first target in this failed operation, al Qaeda’s Mr. Zawahiri, issued an audiotape in which he cocked a snook at General Musharraf, damned him for sending his “miserable” army against the tribesmen and called on the humiliated Pakistani Army to revolt. I suspect the bad fairy of militant Islam will grant him that wish. Al Qaeda’s strategic victory in Spain will be followed by a vastly more significant strategic victory in Pakistan, while the U.S. contents itself with bombing an occasional Afghan orphanage from 20,000 feet. Am I the only one who can see where this is all going? But perhaps it helps to be a German military historian… On War #60 Iraq: The Beginning of Phase Three By William S. Lind An article in the Friday, March 29 Washington Post pointed to the long-expected opening of Phase III of America’s war with Iraq. Phase I was the jousting contest, the formal “war” between America’s and Iraq’s armies that ended with the fall of Baghdad. Phase II was the War of National Liberation waged by the Baath Party and fought guerilla-style. Phase III, which is likely to prove the decisive phase, is true Fourth Generation war, war waged by a wide variety of non-state Iraqi and other Islamic forces for objectives and motives that reach far beyond politics. The Post article, “Iraq Attacks Blamed on Islamic Extremists,” contains the following revealing paragraph:
The article goes on to quote a U.S. intelligence officer as adding, “There is no single organization that’s behind all this. It’s far more decentralized than that.” Welcome to Phase III. The remaining Baathists will of course continue their War of National Liberation, and Fourth Generation elements have been active from the outset. But the situation map in the 1st Armored Division’s headquarters reveals the “tipping point:” Fourth Generation war is now the dominant form of war against the Americans in Iraq. What are the implications of Phase III for America’s attempts to create a stable, democratic Iraq? It is safe to say that they are not favorable. First, it means that the task of recreating a real, functioning Iraqi state – not just a “government” of Quislings living under American protection in the Green Zone – has gotten more difficult. Fourth Generation war represents a quantum move away from the state compared to Phase II, where the Baathists were fighting to recreate a state under their domination. The fractioning process will continue and accelerate, creating more and more resistance groups, each with its own agenda. The defeat of one means nothing in terms of the defeat of others. There is no center to strike at, no hinge that collapses the enemy as a whole, and no way to operationalize the conflict. We are forced into a war of attrition against an enemy who outnumbers us and is far better able to take casualties and still continue the fight. We will also find that we have no enemy we can talk to and nothing to talk about. Since we – but not our enemies – seek closure, that is a great disadvantage. Ending a war, unless it is a war of pure annihilation, means talking to the enemy and reaching some kind of mutually acceptable settlement. When the enemy is not one but a large and growing number of independent elements, talking is pointless because any agreement only ends the war with a single faction. When the enemy’s motivation is not politics but religion, there is also nothing to talk about, unless it is our conversion to Islam. Putting these two together, the result is war without end – or, realistically, an American withdrawal that will also be an American defeat. Finally, the way the war is fought will gradually change its character. Fourth Generation forces, like the Baath, will fight a guerilla war. But religious motivation will gradually introduce new elements. We have already seen one: suicide bombers. We will start to see others: women and children taking active roles, riots where the crowds force “coalition” forces to fire on the people and create massacres, treachery by Iraqis who we think are “friends” (we are already seeing that among the Iraqi police), and finally an Iraqi intifada, where everyone just piles on. That could happen as early as this summer, at the rate things seem to be going. If it does, American forces will have little choice but to get out of Iraq as best they can. Nor is it just in Iraq that American troops are now facing Fourth Generation war. They have their hands full of it in Afghanistan, in Pakistan (by proxy), in Haiti, and in Kosovo. So long as America continues on the strategic offensive, intervening all over the world, the list will grow. In each case, the root problem will be the same: the disintegration of the local state. And in each case, the attempt to recreate a state by sending in American armed forces will fail. As Clausewitz said, “But it is asking too much when a state’s integrity must be maintained entirely by others.” On War #59 Successful Strategic Bombing By William S. Lind In one of history’s shortest and most successful strategic bombing campaigns, Islamic Fourth Generation forces have brought about “regime change” in Spain. The conservative Popular Party, which had allied itself closely with American President George W. Bush and sent Spanish troops to Iraq, was badly defeated in Spain’s national election following last week’s bombings on Spanish commuter trains. As one Popular Party MP said to the Washington Post, “The terrorists have killed 200 people and defeated the government – they have achieved all their objectives.” The new Spanish government will be headed by the Socialist Party, which has promised to pull the Spanish army out of Iraq, withdraw from the U.S.-British axis and realign Madrid with Paris, Berlin and Moscow. How could a strategic bombing campaign waged with a handful of explosives-filled backpacks attain such dramatic results when strategic by bombing fleets of aircraft has usually failed? The answer lies not in the purely military sphere but in the larger field of politics, where Spain’s Popular Party government had left itself extraordinarily vulnerable. The Popular Party’s error was trying to wage a cabinet war typical of the 18th century under modern conditions. In terms of national interests, Spain had nothing at stake in America’s war with Iraq. Polls indicated that the Spanish people were strongly opposed to sending the tercios to Iraq, by as much as 90%. But the Popular Party’s Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, saw a chance to get his name up in lights. And he did, with frequent invitations to the White House and even President Bush’s Texas ranch. He felt like one of the big boys, and the price seemed small – a few dead Spanish soldiers. Like Bush and Blair, he assumed that war could be a one-way street where only the enemy suffered. And now he’s out in the cold, his party defeated in an election the polls said it would handily win. The Madrid bombings brought the war home to Spanish soil, which suddenly made Spain’s participation in it issue number one. Why was Spain in Iraq? The government had no answer, because there really was none. Spain is not the only country whose government is playing the game of cabinet war. Britain’s involvement in Iraq is a cabinet war. So for that matter is America’s; Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was not working with America’s real, Fourth Generation enemies and the United States had no vital national interests at stake. All over Europe, countries are “reforming” their militaries to prepare them for cabinet wars, wars in far-off lands where the key quality is “rapid deployment.” Nations such as Norway have troops fighting in places like Afghanistan. The whole notion that the 21st century can suddenly revert to the 18th and governments can fight wars in which the people and vital national interests are not involved is absurd. That is the real lesson of the Spanish election. War is no longer a “game of princes.” The people are involved, and Fourth Generation opponents know how to make sure they are intensely involved, by bringing the war home to them. The Washington Times quoted a Pentagon official as saying of the Spanish election, “This was a big defeat for us. Al Qaeda caused a regime change better than we did in Baghdad. No cost.” That is exactly correct. Using the simplest of technologies, al Qaeda or whatever Fourth Generation organization did it, undertook a strategic bombing campaign of unprecedented effectiveness. Their backpacks outperformed our B-2 bombers. But if al Qaeda bowled the ball, the pins were set up by the fools in Washington, London and Madrid who believe they can wage 18th century cabinet wars in an all-too-democratic 21st century. On War #58 Why They Throw Rocks By William S. Lind Last week, suicide car bombings left around 200 Shiite pilgrims dead and scores more wounded in Iraq. How did the locals respond? By blaming the Americans. U.S. troops, including medics who were trying to help the wounded, found themselves attacked by stone-throwing mobs. Similarly, in Haiti, when gunmen opened up on a demonstration by Aristide opponents, the locals blamed American Marines for the casualties. What gives? Neither the American soldiers and Marines on the spot nor American citizens at home can understand why we get blamed when Iraqis or Haitians kill each other. After all, we didn’t do it. The answer gets at what the state is all about, or should be all about, and why the state is failing in so many parts of the world: order. As Martin van Creveld writes in his important book, The Rise and Decline of the State, the state arose, in Europe starting in the 15th. century, to bring order. Not freedom, not capitalism, certainly not democracy, but order. Between the decline of the High Middle Ages and the rise of the state, Europe was plagued by disorder, often in the form of roving bands of armed men looking for employment as soldiers. Being skilled in the use of arms and semi-organized (and not having much to lose anyway), if they saw something they wanted, they took it. That meant not only money but the food a family had stored to get it through the winter, along with their warm house; women; boys and young men, to fill up their ranks; horses and other livestock; in short, anything. What they did not steal they destroyed, just for the fun of it. And seeing how long they could keep someone alive under torture often provided an evening’s entertainment. Life was Hobbesian – nasty, brutish and short – for anyone without a castle. The state promised to restore order, and in time it did. As the state spread throughout the world, usually in the form of European colonialism, it made that same promise good beyond Europe. While the state added qualities beyond order as it developed, its legitimacy still depended on upholding its first promise, maintaining order. And it still does so depend. That is why, in countries such as Iraq and Haiti, the locals blame us when order breaks down. As the occupying power, we are responsible for maintaining order. That is true under international law as well as in the eyes of the local people. We are the state now in those places, and when order breaks down, we – the state – have failed. Why do we fail? Any battalion commander in Iraq can easily answer that question. We have far too few troops to do the job. We do not have, and for the most cannot get, effective human intelligence. We do not understand the local culture. “Force protection” keeps us isolated from the local population, and effective policing, which is what keeping order requires, demands integration with the people. As a state military, we are designed to fight other forces like ourselves. Our own rules of engagement keep us from simply hosing crowds with machine-gun fire, and when that happens anyway, it just creates more enemies. There is also the legitimacy problem: because we are a foreign occupier, many locals who want order nonetheless feel compelled to resist us. But these local answers do not address the whole problem. It is not only “over there” where the state no longer brings order. In developed countries, including Britain and the United States, the state has also broken its contract. It no longer effectively provides order on its home soil. In Britain as in the United States, one of the fastest-growing industries is private security. Gated communities are the new castles. My own office on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., is in an area plagued by high levels of crime. The city that wants to rule the world cannot maintain order one thousand yards from the U.S. Capitol Building after nightfall. The state’s growing inability to maintain order, in Baghdad or in Washington, is a primary cause of its intensifying crisis of legitimacy. The remedy is not to be found in new techniques for our troops to use in Iraq or Haiti, or for police to use here at home. In the end, it requires not just new people at the head of the state, but a different kind of people, people who genuinely see themselves as servants of the state, not as racketeers gratifying their own vast egos and enriching themselves, their families and their supporters. That, unfortunately, is a tall order, in Haiti, in Iraq or in Washington. On War #57 Reality 1, Neo-cons 0 By William S. Lind The Marines have landed, and the situation is not well in hand, nor will it ever be. I am speaking, of course, of Haiti, that boil on the Western Hemisphere’s posterior which no plaster can ever cure. In the 18th century, Haiti was so rich, thanks to the sugar trade, that it alone provided two-thirds of the value of France’s overseas commerce. Today, Haiti is so poor that the average American dog probably lives better than the average Haitian. But I forget: just ten years ago, we solved all of Haiti’s problems. Applying the neo-cons’ prescription for the whole world, we sent in thousands of American troops, overthrew the “undemocratic” Haitian government and installed Haiti’s Mr. Chalabi, Monsieur Aristide – the same savior who just departed, with Washington’s encouragement, to the universal anthem of the Third World’s elite, “I’m Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.” For some incomprehensible reason, democracy backed by American bayonets failed to turn Haiti into Switzerland. It’s probably because we forgot to teach them how to make cuckoo clocks and put holes in cheese. Haiti is in fact a fair test of the neo-cons’ thesis, a thesis we are now putting to further trials in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their core argument is that history and culture simply don’t matter. Everyone in the world wants American-style “democratic capitalism,” and everyone is also capable of it. To think otherwise is to commit the sin of “historicism.” The argument is absurd on the face of it. History and culture don’t matter? Not only do the failed cultures and disastrous histories of most of the world argue the contrary, so does our own history and culture. Democratic capitalism first developed in one place, England, over an historical course that goes back almost a thousand years, to the Magna Carta. America was born as an independent country to guarantee the rights of Englishmen. If England had possessed the culture of, say Mongolia, can anyone with the slightest grasp on reality think we would be what we are today? While the neo-cons’ thesis says nothing about reality, it says a great deal about the neo-cons themselves. First, it tells us that they are ideologues. All ideologies posit that certain things must be true, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. That evidence is to be suppressed, along with the people who insist on pointing to it. Sadly, the neo-cons have been able to do exactly that within the Bush Administration, and the mess in Iraq is the price. Second, it reveals the nature of the neo-con ideology, which has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism (as Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is the negation of ideology). The neo-cons in fact are Jacobins, les ultras of the French Revolution who also tried to export “human rights” (which are very different from the concrete, specific rights of Englishmen) on bayonets. Then, the effort eventually united all of Europe against France. Today, it is uniting the rest of the world against America. Finally it reveals the neo-cons as fools, lightweights who can dismiss history and culture because they know nothing of history or culture. The first generation of neo-cons were serious intellectuals, Trotskyites but serious Trotskyites. The generation now in power in Washington is made up of poseurs who happen to have the infighting skills of the Sopranos. If you don’t believe me, look at Mr. Wolfowitz’s book. Or, more precisely, look for Mr. Wolfowitz’s book (hint: he never wrote one). Perhaps it was America’s turn to have its foreign policy captured by a gang of ignorant and reckless adventurers. It has happened to others: Russia before the Russo-Japanese War, Japan in the 1930’s. The results are seldom happy. Before we get ourselves into any more neo-con led follies, we should apply their thesis to a simple test: send them to Haiti and see if they can make a go of it, after the U.S. Marines pull out. If they can, I’ll put my money in a Haitian bank. On War #56 The Discreet Charm Of The (Washington) Bourgeoisie By William S. Lind Earlier this week, I enjoyed the somewhat odd experience of speaking to the Washington chapter of the Council on Foreign Relations. I say "odd" because my own views on foreign affairs are anti-Establishment, while the CFR is the holy of holies of the Establishment elite. To aspiring young Establishmentarians, membership in the CFR is a Holy Grail, the equivalent of joining the Praetorians in Imperial Rome or, among the Masons, achieving the rank of High Wingwang or perhaps even Exalted Grand Wazoo. I was there as part of a panel on Fourth Generation war. The Establishment would prefer not to notice the Fourth Generation, but Fourth Generation war has fastened its fangs firmly into the Establishment's backside in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, so "attention must be paid." Sometimes that means inviting us anti-Establishment types and hoping we don't break too much of the crockery. The other panelists were two retired Army officers, both of whom have written some good things on Third and Fourth Generation war, and a retired Marine Corps general who served as moderator. One panelist noted the degree to which we remain stuck in the Second Generation, especially in what is taught in the various armed forces schools and staff colleges. Another took the neo-con line, predicting a "coming American century," which is about as likely as a coming Austro-Hungarian century. Surprisingly, we all agreed on one point: however good the American military may be from the battalion level down, what goes on above that level doesn't make much sense. One panelist hit the pig right on the snout on the Air Force's F-22 fighter; the only way we will ever be able to use it is if we first give some to whoever is fighting us. But the most significant aspect of the session was not what any of the panelists said. It was the utter inability of the audience, distinguished members of the Council on Foreign Relations, to understand any of it. They were as bewildered as the Gadarene swine. The problem was two-fold. First, the heart of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state, and these people are the state. They are the "policy elite," the people who influence or even decide what hornet's nests we will next stick our nose into around the globe. Us, not legitimate? Mais monsieur, le etat c'est nous! Who could possibly doubt our right to rule? When I suggested folks like Hispanic gang members in L.A. and factory workers in Cleveland whose jobs they are helping outsource to China and India, I got blank looks. As Martin van Creveld said to me one day in my Washington office, "Everybody sees it except the people in the capital cities." The CFR is Exhibit A. The second reason is yet more fundamental. Despite their degrees, resumés and pretensions, the Establishment is no longer made up of "policy" types. Most of its members are placemen. Their expertise is in becoming and remaining members of the Establishment. Their reality is court politics, not the outside reality of a Fourth Generation world or any other kind of world. When that world intrudes, as it did in the panelists' remarks, the proper response is to close the shutters on the windows of Versailles. The CFR had generously allowed me to bring a guest with me into its august precincts, a young Marine major who is doing some excellent work on how to fight Fourth Generation opponents. As we walked to the car, I said to him, "John, the next time you're on an amphib off somebody's coast, waiting for the order to go in, remember that these are the kind of people who will be making the decision." "From that standpoint, I sort of wish I had not come tonight," was his reply. There is nothing left of the vaunted Council on Foreign Relations, or of the Establishment it represents, but dead leaves and dry bones. On War #55 The Withering Away Of The State, Continued By William S. Lind Many years ago, old Uncle Karl foresaw a "withering away of the state" as a prelude to the inauguration of international communism. As history turned out, communism died before the state did. But the state is withering away, as a most interesting development in Iraq demonstrates. Like many aspects of fourth generation war, this development is not something new, but something old, from the time before the state's monopoly on war: mercenaries. My hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, recently dispatched its Friday!Magazine editor, Chuck Yarborough, on an extended journey through Iraq. Friday!Magazine normally reports on plays, movies, restaurants and other entertainment, so Mr. Yarborough's stories reflect a fresh view of that vastly entertaining subject, war. I will leave it to others to speculate as to whether Cleveland is so dull on a Friday night that even Iraq is an improvement ("Would you like those pirogues with or without accordion music?"). In his February 9th story, Yarborough describes Iraq as "a dirty, nasty countryside that looks like the tide just went out on the River Styx...Each time we ground to a stop - as we did often - our South African personal security detachment (PSD, as it is called here) went on high alert...Task Force Shield commander Col. Tom O'Donnell, fresh off 10 days in the United States briefing National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice's deputy on the progress of providing security for the Iraqi oil pipeline, and I rode in the back seat... Trailing us in an unarmored Jeep were the rest of the Erinys Co. team assigned to protect O'Donnell." So U.S. Army colonels now have mercs, not American soldiers, providing their security. "That's very interesting," as John Boyd liked to say. A front-page story in the February 18 Washington Post adds more: Attacks on the private contractors rebuilding Iraq are boosting security expenses, cutting into reconstruction funds and compelling U.S. officials in Baghdad to contend with growing legions of private, armed security teams spread throughout the country... U.S. and coalition military forces, which are being trimmed and face continuing attacks, cannot provide contractor protection, and neither can fledgling Iraqi forces... leaving private teams as the main protection for contractors... Major security contractors (in Iraq) estimated in interviews that at least 40 private security companies and several thousand armed guards already are working in the country. So while at the micro level an American Army colonel has a merc security detail, at the macro level mercenaries are filling the gap between American military forces engulfed in their own war and the security units of Iraq's Vichy regime, most of which are less than keen to fight. What does the return of mercenaries on a large scale, in a theatre of war, tell us? It tells us that state militaries have become so bureaucratic, expensive, and top-heavy that they are losing the ability to fight. On War #54 The January Seminar 2/12/04 One of the purposes of this column is to share with readers the results of the monthly seminar I lead on Fourth Generation warfare. The focus is on the tactical and the practical, ideas that might be of use to American troops who have to face Fourth Generation war in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. That is not to say that I or others in the seminar support the strategy that got us there; it merely recognizes that the strategy has dumped a singularly ugly baby in the laps of our lance corporals and lieutenants. Most of the members of the seminar are active duty Marines. Although I take an occasional shot at the Marine Corps – someone has to cut through Marines’ love for their own bullsh--, and I find the task congenial – the fact is that the Marine Corps has done more serious thinking about war over the last twenty years than the other services put together. We gathered on a frosty January evening with a good fire, plenty of beer for the Marines and port for the civilized. Much of our discussion revolved around what the military might learn from police. Police seek to defuse situations, to de-escalate them, which is what our military needs to do in many, perhaps most, Fourth Generation situations. Escalation works to the advantage of our enemies on the moral level; de-escalation undermines them by allowing normal life to flourish. We quickly encountered a serious obstacle: language. Cops solve at least 90% of all situations by talking. Talking is an alternative to fighting and therefore a critically important tool for de-escalation. The problem is, in places like Iraq our troops cannot talk to the locals because they do not speak the language. We need help from locals to solve this, but how do we get it? In Iraq, we are trying to set up police forces that work for us. But working for us can easily be fatal, both physically and to the legitimacy of the Iraqi police. Many are responding, as they must to survive, by working for both sides at the same time. How can we obtain the loyalty of locals? What if along with money we offered green cards? When Romans occupied an area, they quickly recruited local auxilia who, by twenty years of loyal service to the legions, earned Roman citizenship. Maybe we could develop a program like the KATUSA program in Korea, which recruited Koreans to serve in U.S. infantry companies. Another police question was whether we should equip our troops with shields and riot gear. This brought sharp disagreement; some thought yes, because without shields we are vulnerable to rock-throwers (who are often kids), while others said no because it signals that you are prepared to stand there and take a beating. One Marine said that the Marine Reservists he worked with in the first phase of the Iraq war who were cops had a problem: they could not escalate when the situation required it. Was this their police training working against them? Possibly, but might the situation be reversed in subsequent phases, i.e., the occupation and the fight against Fourth Generation elements? Is perhaps the best achievable outcome in places like Iraq a situation where the locals expend their energies fighting each other? This is far from the neo-con’s objective of “peaceful, democratic capitalism,” but that objective was a fantasy from the outset. It may be time for the foreign policy idealists to exit stage left while the realists enter. Mike Vlahos’ excellent paper, “Terror’s Mask: Insurgency Within Islam,” may point the way here – along with our old friend Machiavelli. If that is the strategy, might the best tactic be getting local factions to do our fighting for us? We have no long-term need for places like Fallujah, but someone who lives there may want it. If they can take it, make an alliance with them and help them do so. What if “someone” is the Baath? Perhaps it is time to say, “Any old port in a storm.” We seem to be taking a Baath in Iraq as it is. One model that keeps coming up in our discussions is the CAP program from Vietnam. One member of the seminar who had been in Iraq said he had lieutenants who were very good at settling their platoons into a neighborhood and becoming part of it. We are far from having enough troops to do this everywhere in Iraq, but maybe doing it in some places would set an example and provide a moral victory. How do we train Marines for all this? We recognized that the problem would come when they took casualties and all the rage and hate and desire for revenge came to the surface. Role-playing might help, including putting Marines in the roles of locals who get humiliated by foreign troops. One pilot suggested SEER school might be a model – that is training where pilots get “shot down and captured,” and have to try to survive and escape. Another idea was to give each patrol a camera. If someone shoots at them, instead of blasting back with the high risk of hitting civilians, get a picture of the shooter. Then, you can either get snipers to hunt him down or take out a contract – the Mafia model – and let locals take care of him. Sometimes “no fingerprints” is more effective than running up a score. What message do we send to proud people like the Iraqis when we establish a “little America” for our troops, where they live not only separated from the population but also in effect sneering at them? What if instead we did like every other army in history and billeted among the local population, paying them well (in gold perhaps) for the quarters? Our central conundrum remains what it has been for the last few meetings of the seminar: everything we are talking about is part of just one model, one alternative to the “kick down the doors and beat ‘em up” model the Army now appears to be using in Iraq. What if our model, the de-escalation model also fails? We still have no answer for that one. On War #53 Fifth Generation Warfare? 2/3/04 Despite the fact that the framework of the Four Generations of Modern War is relatively new, first appearing in print in 1989, some observers are now talking about a Fifth Generation. Some see the Fifth Generation as a product of new technologies, such as nanotechnology. Others define it as the state’s struggle to maintain its monopoly on war and social organization in the face of Fourth Generation challengers. One correspondent defined it as terrorist acts done by one group in such a manner that they are blamed on another, something traditionally known as “pseudo-operations.” These ideas are all valuable, and if people try to think beyond or outside the framework of the Four Generations, that is probably a good thing. An intellectual framework must remain open or it descends into an ideology, something poisonous per se (as Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is the negation of ideology). At the same time, I have to say that these attempts to announce a Fifth Generation seem to go a generation too far. One reason for the confusion may be a misapprehension of what “generation” means. In the context of the Four Generations of Modern War, “generation” is shorthand for a dialectically qualitative shift. As the originator of the framework, I adopted the word “generation” because I was speaking to and writing for Marines, and “dialectically qualitative shift” has more syllables than the Marine mind can readily grasp (think of the Emperor Joseph II’s response when he first heard Mozart’s music: “Too many notes.”). Most Marines vaguely remember that Hegel pitched for the Yankees in the late 1940’s. As that old German would be quick to tell us, dialectically qualitative shifts occur very seldom. In my view, there were only three in the field of warfare since the modern era began with the Peace of Westphalia; the Fourth marks the end of the modern period. One simple test for whether or not something constitutes a generational shift is that, absent a vast disparity in size, an army from a previous generation cannot beat a force from the new generation. The Second Generation French Army of 1940 could not defeat the Third Generation Wehrmacht, even thought the French had more tanks and better tanks than the Germans. The reason I do not think the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon mark a generational shift is that Wellington consistently beat the French, and the British Army he led remained very much an 18th century army. While attempts to think beyond the Four Generations should generally be welcomed, there are some shoals to avoid. One is technological determinism, the false notion that war’s outcome is usually determined by superiority in equipment. Martin van Creveld’s book Technology and War makes a strong case that technology is seldom the determining factor. A related danger is technological hucksterism: coming up with Madison Avenue slogans to sell new weapons programs by claiming that they fundamentally change warfare. This kind of carnival sideshow act lies at the heart of the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs,” and it dominates all discussions of national defense in Washington. Every contractor who hopes to get his snout in the trough claims that his widget “revolutionizes” war. As the framework of the Four Generations spreads, you can be sure that the Merchants of Death will claim that whatever they are trying to sell is an absolute necessity for Fourth (or Fifth) Generation war. It will all be poppycock. From what I have seen thus far, honest attempts to discover a Fifth Generation suggest that their authors have not fully grasped the vast change embodied in the Fourth Generation. The loss of the state’s monopoly, not only on war but also on social organization and first loyalties, alters everything. We are only in the earliest stages of trying to understand what the Fourth Generation means in full and how it will alter – or, in too many cases, end – our lives. Attempting to visualize a Fifth Generation from where we are now is like trying to see the outlines of the Middle Ages from the vantage point of the late Roman Empire. There is no telescope that can reach so far. We can see the barbarians on the march. In America and in Europe, we already find them inside the limes and within the legions. But what follows the chaos they bring in their wake, only the gods on Mount Olympus can see. It may be worth remembering that the last time this happened, the gods themselves died. On War #52 The Discarded Image The Discarded Image is the title of C.S. Lewis’s last book, and perhaps his best. On the surface, it is a discussion of medieval cosmology and the Ptolemaic universe. In reality it is about very much more, including the medieval refutation of the modern notion of “equality,” which decrees that people are interchangeable. That vast error lies at the heart of many of the ideologies which made the 20th century such a horror and which still gnaw at the vitals of Western civilization. Lewis recognized that on many matters, our medieval ancestors were wiser than ourselves. Lewis’s book was brought to mind by a letter from a reader of this column, who asked a difficult question:
My correspondent has grasped the most difficult point about Fourth Generation war. In its ultimate form, it is not something we face “over there,” in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor is it an import, like 9/11. Fourth Generation theory says that the state here, in the good old USA, is also likely to break apart as Americans too transfer their primary loyalty away from the state to a wide variety of other things. The conflicts among these new loyalties will in many cases be sharp enough to generate fighting. In the face of this possibility, or maybe probability, what indeed are individuals and families to do? I think the answer, if there is one, begins with my friend David Kline’s farm. David Kline is an Amishman. He farms about 200 acres in Holmes County, Ohio, good land that supports a herd of forty to fifty dairy cows. He has some modern equipment, such as milking machines, but his life does not depend on any of it. In today’s world, his farm provides him a good living. In a Fourth Generation world, his farm would still provide well for him and his family. I am not talking about “survivalism” here. The Kline farm represents much more than that. As I have said to David more than once, what he and other Amish are doing is preserving an understanding of how to live in reality for the time when all the virtual realities collapse. Virtual realities lie at the heart of Brave New World, aka the New World Order, “globalism,” “democratic capitalism” (as the neo-cons define it), etc. The bargain Brave New World offers is this: if you will only do as Marcuse advises and trade the Reality Principle for the Pleasure Principle, we will enmesh you in virtual realities that will make you happy. True, you will lose your free will, because our virtual realities will condition you to think as we want you to. But they will also give you anything and everything you want. So what if none of it is real? All that matters is that you feel happy, right now. As our medieval forefathers would quickly recognize, this is Hell speaking. Hell has always loathed reality, because in reality, Christ is king. Wiser than we, the medievals were interested not in felicitas but in beautitudine – not in being happy but in being saved. Had they been given a television or a video game, they would have smelled brimstone. Not only do virtual realities lead to Hell, they have another drawback, one that a Fourth Generation world will soon bring to the fore: all of them, without exception, eventually collapse. The complex structures and vast resources required to sustain them are evanescent. The realities of the Fourth Generation are hard and sharp, and they will slice and dice virtual realities like, well – dare I say the Scimitar of Islam? Many Islamics, unlike most Christians, seem to recognize Brave New World for what it is. Which brings me back to David Kline’s farm. Is the answer to my reader’s question that we should all become Amish? No, because in the end some of us will have to fight or the world will have no place for the Amish. Should we all live like Amish farmers? Here the answer is closer to “yes.” At the least, even if we do not farm, we need to separate our lives and the lives of our families from the virtual realities and live in reality itself. The small family farm may not be the only way to do that, but it is a good way. David Kline’s farm is itself a discarded image. But it is an image America discarded not very long ago. As David says, “I just farm the way everybody did fifty years ago.” David edits Farming Magazine, a thoughtful and literate quarterly dedicated to teaching others, Amish and non-Amish, how they too can make a good living from a small farm, farmed the old way. His discarded image is one we can find, still living, perhaps not too far down the road. My correspondent concluded, “How do you apply non-state warfare to family protection? Give me only those practical items that can be implemented on the individual and family level.” Well, I don’t know many things more practical than an Amish farm, nor better at protecting families. And I do know that answers to the Fourth Generation and to Brave New World, false images both, can only be found at the individual and family level, because that is where the decision to live by the Reality Principle must be made. On War #51 The Army’s “Transformation” The favorite buzzword in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is “Transformation,” and for the most part it means nothing more than winning through superior technology, an old but highly profitable delusion (see Martin van Creveld’s Technology and War). It is geared almost entirely to fighting other states, which is to say jousting contests, and has little relevance to war with non-state entities, which is where real war is headed. So long as it keeps all the contractors happy (and it does), Washington is content with it. But the U.S. Army seems to be looking for something more. I was recently invited to join a daylong session of the Army’s “Transformation” task force dealing with force structure, and I left with the feeling that the soldiers in the group were striving for real reform (the contractors were another matter). It has been widely reported that the Army intends to replace the division with the brigade as its basic “building block,” as advocated in Doug Macgregor’s Breaking the Phalanx. In itself, this is a positive change. Most armies went to brigades or smaller divisions long ago. The problem is that change may be good but insufficient; the French Army’s development of armored forces in the 1930s is an example. Is what the Army is defining as “Transformation” sufficient change to meet the Fourth Generation of modern war, or at least bring it from the Second Generation (firepower/attrition warfare) into the Third (maneuver warfare)? The answer is at best unclear. Two subsidiary questions might help answer that large question: how far does the Army’s proposed “Transformation” move it toward being able to engage non-state opponents effectively, and if all the proposed reforms were already in place, how much difference would they make in the two wars the Army is now fighting, in Iraq and in Afghanistan? From what I saw in my day with the force structure task force, the answers are a) not very far and b) not very much. That does not bode well in terms of answering the larger question. In my opinion, far more radical change is required than merely substituting brigades for divisions as the basic building block. Here are two concrete examples: if “Transformation” truly means moving the U.S. Army from the Second to the Third Generation, headquarters above the brigade level would become both fewer and smaller. Will that happen? Another example: a Third Generation military understands John Boyd’s point that implicit communications are faster and more reliable than explicit communications. Yet the Army (and the other services) continues to spend billions making communications explicit, computerizing anything and everything to the point where commanders drown in “information.” When Boyd asked German Generals Balck and von Mellinthin how computers would have affected their ability to fight maneuver warfare, they said, “We couldn’t have done it.” Small staffs and a small officer corps above the company grades, not vast information flows, are the key to communications for a Third Generation army. What seems to be emerging from the Army’s “Transformation” process is a hybrid of the Second and Third Generations. The concepts, some of them anyway, are Third Generation. But the Army’s structure will remain Second Generation. Hybrids are dangerous, because their internal contradictions can become vast friction generators, and Clausewitz tells us where that can lead. The key issue is not the Army’s force structure, but its culture. Does it remain Second Generation, focused inward on process, prizing obedience above initiative and depending on imposed discipline? Or does it transition to the Third Generation, focusing outward on the enemy, the situation and the result the situation requires, prizing initiative over obedience and depending on self-discipline? A Third Generation culture will eventually fix a Second Generation force structure, but no force structure can help a Second Generation military culture. At the end of the day, my impression was that the big, green Army dinosaur has gotten its head up out of the swamp (apologies to you Ranger types, but from my vantage point it appears to be an herbivore). The question is whether it can evolve fast enough to match the speed of change in war itself. If not, it will join the rest of its kind in the coming mass extinction of Second Generation armies, and of the states defend. On War #50 More Thoughts From The 4th Generation Seminar The seminar on Fourth Generation war that meets each month at my house took as its December topic the following question: You are the commander of the Marine Corps unit that will take over Fallujah in March; what will you do? Army and Marine Corps participants agreed that your first task is to tell the locals, “We’re not like the guys who just left” – the 82nd Airborne. Wear the new Marine Corps utilities that look different from the Army desert uniforms. Don’t “relieve in place;” instead, move into new areas, not the Army’s old billets. Patrol on foot, not in vehicles. Wear soft covers, not helmets and body armor. Don’t wear sunglasses. Teach your troops a bit of Arabic, so they can say, “We’re different.” Teach them enough Arab culture so they avoid gross insults, like stepping on the heads of people they detain. Don’t do raids, breaking people’s doors down in the middle of the night. Make sure you have plenty of money, and pass it around. Maybe the first thing the Marines should say is, “We are here to pay the blood money” – compensation to families who have had members killed by Americans. Without blood money, the locals’ honor requires that they fight you to avenge their dead. Here, Washington is a major obstacle, because it requires peacetime accounting rules for any money our forces spend. Commanders need a generous slush fund. Remember that success comes not from escalation, but from de-escalation. This may require taking more casualties than you inflict. We need to re-think “force protection;” if it isolates us from the population, it works against us. Of course, we will take casualties. How long can we sustain this alternate, “softer” approach as our casualties mount? The troops need to be trained and prepared for doing so, because their natural response will be to take it out on the population. One Marine said that we have to talk through traumatic events with the men when they happen, so they do not take revenge. They have to be willing not to kill. If Fallujah is a hard spot, don’t start there; start where the situation is more favorable. Maybe we should not go into Fallujah at first. A Marine suggested we use the “ink blot” strategy the Special Forces initially used in Vietnam, with good results. Let each squad get to know one particular area and the people in it. Regrettably, we probably won’t have enough troops to make this work. We asked some radical questions: what if the Marines carried no weapons? One participant who spent time in Iraq said we have to be armed, because Iraq is an armed society and anyone without a weapon looks weak. Should we offer the guerillas a deal where they take responsibility for local security? Should we set up a liaison office where the locals can tell us what they need to get life working again, then we try to provide that to them? Should our troops wear civilian clothes, at least when working with Iraqis to repair infrastructure? One Marine said that in Numaniya, his men had backed off on checkpoints for weapons and had loosened controls a little at a time; this gained a good deal of popular support. Another Marine talked about a rule we had in Somalia, where locals could carry weapons around Americans so long as they pointed the muzzles down. The Somali militiamen were willing to do that. Toward the end of our seminar, we faced what may be the toughest question: what if the Marines do all this (and the thinking at Camp Pendleton seems to be similar to what we have come up with), and it doesn’t work? An Army officer said that at that point, the U.S. military may need to turn the problem back over to the politicians in Washington; the military will have done all it can do. But there may be some other approaches. There is the British Northwest Frontier Agent model, where we would try to shift local balances of power. This may mean more to the locals than anything else, because the new power relationships we help create may be there long after we leave. But this requires superb local intelligence, and we usually don’t have it. There may be a “Mafia model,” where instead of acting directly, we contract “hits” on the bad guys, who just disappear with no American fingerprints on them. This helps keep us out of the local blood feud culture. At its first session, our seminar said that we may find ourselves asking questions to which there are no answers. But we intend to keep asking. In January, in addition to continuing the above discussion, we will ask the question, how do you train Marines for all this? I’ll let you know where that discussion goes in a future column. On War #49 How 2004 Looks From Potsdam At the beginning of a new year, it is traditional for columnists, commentators and other harmless drudges to take a look at their crystal ball and forecast what the year may bring. Fortunately, I have superior technology. My home telephone was made in 1918. When I need to see down the road a bit, I just call the Kaiser (he is, after all, my reporting senior). I got through to Potsdam a few nights ago, and here is what der Allerhoechste thinks may be in store for us in 2004:
I knew there was a Zapfenstreich in Heaven that night, and I did not want to keep my Sovereign on the phone with the petty concerns of earth. But I did follow up his last comment with a final question: was “something real” likely to happen in 2004? His Majesty sighed. “Look for something big, real big, right before your election. Al Qaeda has an excellent sense of timing.” “But wouldn’t that help reelect George Bush?” I asked, puzzled. “Ja, genau,” the Kaiser replied. “I guess you haven’t spent enough time at court to really understand these things. As Bismarck said to me just yesterday, al Qaeda and George Bush need each other.” On War #47 Understanding Fourth Generation War Will Saddam’s capture mark a turning point in the war in Iraq? Don’t count on it. Few resistance fighters have been fighting for Saddam personally. Saddam’s capture may lead to a fractioning of the Baath Party, which would move us further toward a Fourth Generation situation where no one can recreate the state. It may also tell the Shiites that they no longer need America to protect them from Saddam, giving them more options in their struggle for free elections. If the U.S. Army used the capture of Saddam to announce the end of tactics that enrage ordinary Iraqis and drive them toward active resistance, it might buy us a bit of de-escalation. But I don’t think we’ll that be smart. When it comes to Fourth Generation war, it seems nobody in the American military gets it. Recently, a faculty member at the National Defense University wrote to Marine Corps General Mattis, commander of I MAR DIV, to ask his views on the importance of reading military history. Mattis responded with an eloquent defense of taking time to read history, one that should go up on the wall at all of our military schools. “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation,” Mattis said. “It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.” Still, even such a capable and well-bread commander as General Mattis seems to miss the point about Fourth Generation warfare. He said in his missive, “Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say…’Not really”… Well, that isn’t quite what we Fourth Generation intellectuals are saying. On the contrary, we have pointed out over and over that the 4th Generation is not novel but a return, specifically a return to the way war worked before the rise of the state. Now, as then, many different entities, not just governments of states, will wage war. They will wage war for many different reasons, not just “the extension of politics by other means.” And they will use many different tools to fight war, not restricting themselves to what we recognize as military forces. When I am asked to recommend a good book describing what a Fourth Generation world will be like, I usually suggest Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. Nor are we saying that Fourth Generation tactics are new. On the contrary, many of the tactics Fourth Generation opponents use are standard guerilla tactics. Others, including much of what we call “terrorism,” are classic Arab light cavalry warfare carried out with modern technology at the operational and strategic, not just tactical, levels. As I have said before in this column, most of what we are facing in Iraq today is not yet Fourth Generation warfare, but a War of National Liberation, fought by people whose goal is to restore a Baathist state. But as that goal fades and those forces splinter, Fourth Generation war will come more and more to the fore. What will characterize it is not vast changes in how the enemy fights, but rather in who fights and what they fight for. The change in who fights makes it difficult for us to tell friend from foe. A good example is the advent of female suicide bombers; do U.S. troops now start frisking every Moslem woman they encounter? The change in what our enemies fight for makes impossible the political compromises that are necessary to ending any war. We find that when it comes to making peace, we have no one to talk to and nothing to talk about. And the end of a war like that in Iraq becomes inevitable: the local state we attacked vanishes, leaving behind either a stateless region (Somalia) or a façade of a state (Afghanistan) within which more non-state elements rise and fight. General Mattis is correct that none of this is new. It is only new to state armed forces that were designed to fight other state armed forces. The fact that no state military has recently succeeded in defeating a non-state enemy reminds us that Clio has a sense of humor: history also teaches us that not all problems have solutions. On War #46 How To Fight 4GW, continued In On War #45, I began a report from the seminar I take part in on how to fight Fourth Generation war. This column continues that report.
The seminar intends to continue working on this question of redefining “Transformation” (die Verwandlung?) so as to make it relevant to 4GW. However, for our December meeting, we have posed the following problem: It is Spring, 2004. The U.S. Marines are to relieve the Army in the occupation of Fallujah, perhaps Iraq’s hottest hot spot (and one where the 82nd Airborne’s tactics have been pouring gasoline on the fire). You are the commander of the Marine force taking over Fallujah. What do you do? I’ll let you know what we come up with. If you would like to interview Mr. Lind, please allow me to be of assistance. Jill Sutherland Farrell The Free Congress Foundation is a 26-year-old Washington, DC-based conservative think tank, that teaches people how to be effective in the political process, advocates judicial reform, promotes cultural conservatism, and works against the government encroachment of individual liberties. On War #45 How To Fight Fourth Generation War For almost two years, a small seminar has been meeting at my house to work on the question of how to fight Fourth Generation war. It is made up mostly of Marines, lieutenant through lieutenant colonel, with one Army officer, one National Guard tanker captain and one foreign officer. We figured somebody ought to be working on the most difficult question facing the U.S. armed forces, and nobody else seems to be. The seminar recently decided it was time to go public with a few of the ideas it has come up with, and use this column to that end. We have no magic solutions to offer, only some thoughts. We recognized from the outset that the whole task may be hopeless; state militaries may not be able to come to grips with Fourth Generation enemies no matter what they do. But for what they are worth, here are our thoughts to date:
There are two ways to deal with the issue of force protection. One way is the way we are currently doing it, which is to separate ourselves from the population and to intimidate them with our firepower. A more viable alternative might be to take the opposite approach and integrate with the community. That way you find out more of what is going on and the population protects you. The British approach of getting the helmets off as soon as possible may actually be saving lives.
I will continue this report in my next column. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism On War #44 The Politics of War As I said in an earlier column, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are already lost. Nothing the United States can do can yield an American victory in either place. In all probability, both wars were lost before the first bomb was dropped or the first shot fired. They were lost because, in an era when the state is in decline, our wares on the Afghan and Iraqi states were doomed to be too successful. We fought to destroy two regimes, but what we ended up doing was destroying two states. Neither in Afghanistan nor in Iraq are we able to recreate the state, which means that Fourth Generation, non-state forces will come to dominate both places. And neither we nor any other state knows how to defeat Fourth Generation enemies. To the degree America had a chance of real victory in either war, we lost that chance through early mistakes. In Afghanistan, we failed to bring the Pashtun into the new government, which means we remain allied with the Uzbeks and Tajiks against the Pashtun. Unfortunately, in the end the Pashtun always win Afghan wars. In Iraq, the two fatal early errors were outlawing the Baath Party and disbanding the Iraqi army. Outlawing the Baath deprived the Sunni community of its only political vehicle, which meant it had no choice but to fight us. Disbanding the Iraqi army left us with no native force that could maintain order, and also provided the resistance with a large pool of armed and trained fighters. Washington is now making noises about reversing both of those early decisions, but it is simply too late. As von Moltke said, a mistake in initial dispositions can seldom be put right. What is interesting is that the most powerful man in Washington, Karl Rove, who is President George W. Bush’s political advisor, has apparently figured out that the Iraq war is lost (Afghanistan is not on his political radar screen). Further, he has discerned that if Mr. Bush goes into the 2004 election with the war in Iraq still going on, and still going badly, Mr. Bush is toast. The result was the recent decision to turn back to the Iraqi’s sometime next summer. Will it work? Probably not. Mr. Rove still faces two big fights, and neither will be easy. The first will be a nasty political brawl with the so-called “neo-cons,” more accurately neo-Jacobins, who gave us the Iraq War in the first place. Their political future is at stake in Iraq, and if we are defeated, they go straight into history’s wastebasket. They are determined to fight down to the last American paratrooper, and once they figure out that Mr. Rove wants out, they will go after him with everything they have. The other fight will be in Iraq itself, where we will see a race between American efforts to create at least the fig leaf of a functioning Iraqi state so we can get out with some tail feathers intact and a resistance movement that is rapidly gaining strength. My bet is that, unfortunately, we will lose. Again, the root problem is that in a Fourth Generation world, once you have destroyed a state recreating it is very difficult. More, as is typical of a power facing defeat, our moves are too little and too late. By next summer, when we hope to transfer sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, it is likely to represent a frustration of the Shiites’ hope to use their majority status to create a Shiite Islamic Republic. That may deprive us, and the new Iraqi government, of the one prop we still have, a relatively quiescent Shiite population. The upshot of all of this is that despite Mr. Rove’s belated wakening to political reality, Mr. Bush will go into the 2004 election with one of two albatrosses around his neck: a continuing, losing guerilla war, with ever-increasing American casualties, or an out-and-out American defeat, where we have left Iraq very much the way the Soviets left Afghanistan. Which is, by the way, the way we will also leave Afghanistan itself. The neo-cons’ parting gift to real American conservatives will be President Hillary Clinton. Thanks a lot, guys. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism On War #42 Post-Machine Gun Tactics Thirty years ago this month, I first went to the field with the United States Marine Corps. I was a new staffer for Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio, and the Marines had invited me down for the “Company War” at The Basic School at Quantico, Virginia. Early one frosty November morning, I found myself standing in the commander’s hatch of an M-48 tank moving about two miles per hour with the infantry walking alongside, just as in 1917. When we reached the “objective,” which was an enemy machine gun nest, the tank stopped while the infantry formed a line two men deep and walked into the machine gun. I turned to the Marine major who was my escort and asked, “Where are Frederick the Great and the band?” It was obvious that what I was seeing was not modern war. Sadly, the last time I went to the field with TBS a couple years ago, little had changed. I again watched the lieutenants hurl themselves against enemy machine guns. When the attack had concluded, I turned to them and said, “You know you are all dead, don’t you?” One of the lieutenants replied, “We know that, but what else can you do?” There are answers to that question, in the form of the “post-machine gun tactics” developed during and after World War I by a number of foreign armies. Those tactics are now readily available to Marine lieutenants and everyone else, through three superb books written by a former Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, H. John Poole. John Poole’s first book, The Last Hundred Yards, came out in 1997 and immediately acquired almost cult status with Marine NCOs. As Bruce Gudmundsson, the author of Stormtroop Tactics, said, it represented at least a half-century’s advance over official Marine Corps (and U.S. Army) tactics. Of critical importance, it also filled a gap left by writings such as Gudmundsson’s book and my own Maneuver Warfare Handbook by looking in great detail at the level where tactics and techniques come together, the world of the fire team, squad and platoon. It opened a whole new world to corporals, sergeants and staff NCOs by focusing on that toughest of battlefield problems, covering the last hundred yards to the enemy. It showed them that you do not have to (and never should) throw your men into enemy machine guns. In August 2001, Gunny Poole published another book with a different take on the same problem: Phantom Soldier: The Enemy’s Answer to U.S. Firepower. Here, Poole focused on the Asian way of war, where tactics usually follow the indirect approach. Avoiding the frontal jousting contests beloved by Western armies, Eastern militaries usually use stealth, subtlety and fieldcraft to evade Western firepower and take their enemies from behind, in a manner and at a time the enemy least expects. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Phantom Soldier suddenly became the hottest book in the Pentagon – which did not prevent the failure of Operation Anaconda, where al Qaeda fought exactly as Poole said an Eastern force would fight. John Poole’s newest book has just come out. Titled The Tiger’s Way: A U.S. Private’s Best Chance for Survival, it looks at Asian, Russian and German small-unit tactics to draw the best from each. Most importantly, Poole uses his new book to redefine “the basics,” that mantra of bad infantry instructors who use the term to justify their “Hey-diddle-diddle, straight-up-the-middle” approach that measures success in own casualties. Gunny Poole’s new basics, each of which gets its own chapter, are microterrain appreciation, harnessing the senses, night familiarity (which is far more than night vision devices), nondetectable movement, guarded communication, discreet force at close range (of prime importance in Iraq, where the U.S. Army’s indiscreet use of firepower is daily generating more enemies), combat deception and one-on-one tactical decision making, which encourages thinking and initiative down through the most junior ranks. It is of course inexcusable that most of the schools American privates go through still teach pre-machine gun tactics. If the Pentagon thought about war, that would be one of the first things it would change. But so long as the Pentagon thinks only about programs and money, American soldiers and Marines will need to discover post-machine gun tactics on their own. Gunny Poole’s books offer them a readily available way to do so. My advice to our junior infantry leaders is, get these books and read them now if you want to keep your men alive. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism On War #41 Indicators - Iraqi guerrillas are attacking tanks This week's tragic shooting down of an Army Chinook helicopter near Fallujah, with the loss of 16 soldiers, may or may not point to a significant new development in the Iraq war. Helicopters proved highly vulnerable in Vietnam and in the Soviet war in Afghanistan as well, and there is no shortage of SA-7 missiles in Iraq, as U.S. forces there have long known. Moreover, there is a fairly simple technique helicopters can use to minimize their vulnerability to the SA-7 and similar shoulder-fired missiles: fly high. In Afghanistan, Soviet infantry referred to their helicopter pilots as "the Cosmonauts" because of their desire for altitude. Of course, altitude also works against us in that it prevents the people in helicopters from seeing what is happening on the ground. But when your aircraft is a big piñata, high is the way to fly. Three events last week may actually provide more in the way of indicators as to where the Iraq war is headed. The first two were successful attacks on American M-1 Abrams tanks by Iraqi resistance forces. In the first attack, the M-1 was taken out by what appears to have been a tandem-warhead light anti-tank weapon, which no one knew the resistance possessed. Fortunately, in that attack no Americans were seriously hurt, though the tank was disabled. The second attack resulted in the complete destruction of an M-1, with the turret blown off the chassis of the tank by a large improvised mine. Sadly, two American tank crewmen were killed and one badly wounded. The technique is the same as that used by the Palestinians to destroy several Israeli Merkava tanks, so it should not have come as a surprise to us. More significant than the destruction of two American tanks is the fact that Iraqi guerrillas are attacking tanks. This is an indicator that the guerilla war is developing significantly more rapidly than reports in Washington suggest. With the second stage of the Iraq war just six months old, one would expect the guerillas to be attacking only weak, vulnerable targets, such as supply columns. The fact that they are going after the most difficult of all ground targets, heavy tanks, is surprising. It means they lack neither confidence nor skill. A third indicator comes from a widely-reported incident where an American battalion commander threatened an Iraqi under interrogation with his pistol and now faces criminal assault charges for doing so. The charges themselves are absurd, since the Iraqi was not injured and the information he provided prevented American soldiers from being ambushed. Here, the indicator comes from the identity of the Iraqi. Who was he? An Iraqi policeman. The Bush administration's strategy for the war in Iraq, to the degree floundering can be called a strategy, is "Iraqification:" developing Iraqi armed security forces such as police, border guards, civil defense guards and a "New Iraqi Army," and dumping the insurgency in their laps. Last week's incident shows the major flaw in that strategy: it assumes that the Iraqis in those forces will really be working for us. Guerillas and, even more, Fourth Generation elements deal with state security forces primarily by taking them from within. They will also attack members of the state forces and their families, as part of punishing collaborators. But taking them from within is even more effective, because when we think the members of the state forces we create are working for us, we let them in positions where they can do real damage. Only too late do we discover where their real loyalty lies. Naively, we seem to believe that if we are paying someone, they will give us their honest best. Some will. But especially in old, cynical societies such as that in Mesopotamia, people see nothing wrong with serving two or more masters, and getting a paycheck from each. They have no real loyalty beyond their family and, perhaps, their clan or tribe. Everyone else is trying to use them, and they are trying to use everyone else. That is just how the place works. As we create more and more Iraqi armed units, and try desperately to hand the war over to them, don't be surprised if they refuse to play our game. They will tell us what we want to hear to get paid, and then do what benefits them. Often, that will just be seeing and hearing nothing as the resistance forces go about their business. Sometimes, it will be shooting Americans in the back. It doesn't take many such shootings before we have to treat the Iraqi forces we have ourselves created with distrust, pushing even those who want to work with us into our enemies' arms. One other indicator: a friend recently noted to me that the rapidly improving techniques we see from the Iraqi guerrillas bear a striking resemblance to those used by the Chechen guerrillas against the Russians. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism On War #40 Curiouser And Curiouser If there is one thing that all Washington should be able to agree on, it is that the United States does not want to fight another war in Korea. The bloodbath would be horrific, the financial cost would be ruinous, and the effects of such a war on the stability of northeast Asia would be unpredictable. Plus, we might not win. Yet when President Bush was asked during his recent Asian trip about North Korea’s request for a non-aggression pact with the United States, he replied, “We will not have a treaty, if that’s what you’re asking. That’s off the table.” For heaven’s sake, why? North Korea has offered to give up its nuclear weapons program for such a treaty. Speaking with Thailand’s prime minister, Mr. Bush later said, “We have no intention of invading North Korea.” If that is true, then what is the Administration’s objection to a formal non-aggression pact? At the very least, offering North Korea such a pact would put the onus on them if they chose to continue their nuclear program instead. And if they did in fact give up their nukes in return for a treaty, we would walk away with a very good deal. Here we see the underlying problem with the Bush administration’s foreign policy. On the surface, its actions often do not make sense. There is no obvious, clear, or even rational explanation for positions the administration takes. Naturally, that leads people at home and abroad to ask what is really going on. What is the Bush team up to? What is their hidden agenda? What are their real intentions and plans? The Iraq war is exhibit A. Since Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and was not working with non-state, Fourth Generation forces (aka “terrorists”), what are the real reasons America attacked Iraq? For oil? For Israel? For world dominion? Everyone speculates, because the official answers don’t make sense. Now the same speculation is underway about American intentions in Korea. Does America perhaps plan to attack North Korea’s nuclear facilities? Does it think a war in Korea would injure China, which elements in Washington see as a probable future enemy? Do Pentagon advocates of the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” believe they could win an easy victory over North Korea, thereby justifying even more money for high-tech weapons? What are the unstated, real reasons behind Mr. Bush’s refusal to consider a non-aggression pact? It appears that North Korea may save the Bush administration from itself in this case. Secretary of State Colin Powell has indicated that the U.S. might offer a written guarantee of some sort that it will not attack North Korea, a guarantee that would be backed by China, Japan and Russia as well. After first rejecting this offer, the North Korea now appears willing to reconsider. This is wise from their perspective, because a guarantee involving the other regional powers would put more, not fewer, constraints on Washington than would a bilateral treaty. If America signed, then attacked North Korea anyway under the administration’s preventative war doctrine, it would have serious problems with China, Russia and Japan. It is all too easy to imagine Mr. Rumsfeld, at a news conference following an American strike on North Korea, referring to a non-aggression pact as a mere “scrap of paper.” But the underlying problem remains. So long as Washington’s actions do not make sense in terms of its stated policies and intentions, people will keep wondering what the real game is. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. One is tempted to revise a bon mot from that worst of years, 1914: in Pyongyang, the situation is serious but not hopeless; in Washington, it is hopeless but not serious. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism On War #37 Utopia Means "No Place" In an earlier column, I noted that the current phase of the war in Iraq is driven by three different elements: chaos, a War of National Liberation (which is inflicting most of the casualties) and Fourth Generation war. In time, the Fourth Generation elements will come to predominate, as they fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the Iraqi state. But right now, chaos is again on the front page. Former soldiers of the Iraqi army are rioting for their back pay. The scope of Mr. Bremer's blunder in dismissing the Iraqi army instead of using it to maintain order is more and more evident. Many of those former Iraqi soldiers whom we could have employed are now joining the War of National Liberation, shooting at and sometimes hitting Americans. But two aspects of this burst of chaos point to a more fundamental American error. Speaking of the rioting soldiers, the Washington Times reported that "many of the men at Sunday's protest in Baghdad voiced desperation that they had no jobs and no money to support their families." The Bush Administration, hoping to turn the American public's gaze away from the reality in Iraq, meanwhile trotted out the first American-trained battalion of the "New Iraqi Army," a "multicultural" force supposedly indoctrinated to be nice to other Iraqis. (If Iraq breaks up along ethnic and sectarian lines, the New Iraqi Army will do the same, just as the Lebanese army did.) What both these phenomena point to is a classic American error, utopianism. The old Iraqi army did not meet utopian standards, so it had to be sent away, unpaid. We must create a New Iraqi Army which will reflect our highest ideals. Meanwhile, Iraqis don't have jobs, because Saddam's state-run economy doesn't meet utopian standards. We have to "privatize" that economy, which if other countries' experiences are any guide will involve several years of continued economic decline and jobless chaos. Again, anything less would "betray American ideals." It is useful to remember that the word "utopia" means "no place." By definition, utopias cannot exist in the real world. Attempts to create them lead to disaster, as both the French and Russian Revolutions attest. What Mr. Bremer and the neo-con philosphes behind him are insisting upon guarantees more, not less, chaos in Iraq. Panglossading through reality, they refuse to revive the old Iraq before attempting to create their utopian New Iraq. The electric power system offers an example. Iraqis know how to make their 1960's-technology electric grid work. But we won't let them. American companies have to get the job, and since they cannot work with 1960's technology, they have to build a whole new system from the bottom up. Meanwhile, Iraqis go without power. Of course, the whole neo-con enterprise was utopian from the beginning. Denying the limits history places on potential (the sin of "historicism" in their Straussian Newspeak), neo-cons really believe every flea-bitten, fly-blown Third World hellhole can be turned into Switzerland. All it takes is enough American troops. An old line about the Marine Corps comes to mind: the difference between the Boy Scouts and the Marine Corps is that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision. Are there no adults overseeing American policy in Iraq? If there are, it is about time for them to tell the hapless Mr. Bremer to get the old Iraq working again, and let Iraqis worry about utopia. That might at least give the United States what it so desperately needs in Iraq: a way out. Biography: Mr. Lind is author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Westview Press, 1985); co-author, with Gary Hart, of America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform (Adler & Adler, 1986); and co-author, with William H. Marshner, of Cultural Mr. Lind co-authored the prescient article, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation," which was published in The Marine Corps Gazette in October, 1989 and which first propounded the concept of "Fourth Generation War." Mr. Lind and his co-authors predicted that states would increasingly face threats not from other states, but from non-state forces whose primary allegiance was to their religion, ethnic group or ideology. Following the events of September 11, 2001, the article has been credited for its foresight by The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Lind was one of the founders of cultural conservatism, which argues that America's success has been a product more of its traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture than of its political or economic systems. He was an early voice exposing "Political Correctness" and "multiculturalism" as cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms largely through the work of the Frankfurt School. Mr. Lind also served for eight years as Associate Publisher of The New Electric Railway Journal and is co-author of a series of studies on conservatives and public transportation. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism On War #29 How NOT To Use Light Armored Vehicles One day in the late 1970's, when I was a defense staffer for Senator Gary Hart, I got a call from an Armed Services Committee staffer asking if I knew anything about Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs), which are what we used to call armored cars. A bit, I replied. What did I think of them, he asked? I said I liked them for operational maneuver, because they are wheeled, and most operational (as opposed to tactical) movement is on roads. That was the beginning of the Marine Corps' LAV program. We soon roped in a one-star at Quantico named Al Gray, and within a few years the Corps had some LAVs. The concept for which they were purchased was very clear: to form soviet-style Operational Maneuver Groups for use against Third World countries. We all knew that LAVs are tactically fragile, and must be used in ways that avoid heavy combat. We also knew that the tank the U.S. armed forces were then buying, the M-1, was too heavy and used too much fuel to be able to maneuver rapidly over operational distances. The LAVs could fill the gap. As one of the Urvater of the Marines' LAV program, I was pleased to hear a couple years ago that the Army was now also planning to buy LAVs. Good, I thought; they too have recognized that the M-1 is more a Sturmgeschuetz or a Jagdpanzer than a real tank, and they need something else for operational maneuver. {Editor's note: these are also known as "tank destroyers." See, for example, http://www.achtungpanzer.com/pz10.htm.] I should have known better, given that we are talking about the U.S. Army. Nonetheless, it was with unbelief, then horror, that I learned what the Army was really buying LAVs (called Strykers) for: urban combat. And now, the first Stryker units are to be sent to Iraq. The magnitude of the idiocy involved in using Light Armored Vehicles in urban fighting, where they are grapes for RPGs, is so vast that analogies are difficult. Maybe one could compare it to planning a fireworks display on board the Hindenburg. Urban combat is extremely dangerous for any armored vehicle, including the heaviest tanks, as the Israelis can testify after losing several Merkavas in the Gaza strip (to mines—real big ones). Why? Because for opposing fighters, regular infantry or guerillas, the old sequence from the German "men against tanks" is easy. The sequence is, "blind 'em, stop 'em, kill 'em." Armored vehicles are already blind in cities, because distances are short; the safest place near a hostile tank is as close to is as you can get, because then it can't see you. Stopping is also easy, because streets are narrow and vehicles often cannot turn around. And with LAVs, once they are blind and stopped, killing is real easy because the armor is, well, light. That's why they are called Light Armored Vehicles. In the first phase of the war in Iraq, the jousting contest, the Marine Corps lost M-1 tanks and it lost Amtracks, its amphibious personnel carrier. But it lost no LAVs. That is a testament, not to the vehicles, but to how they were employed. But now, in the second phase of the Iraq war, and in future phases as well, there will be no role for operational maneuver. And there will be no role for LAVs or Strykers. If the Army insists on sending them into Iraqi towns and cities, they should first equip them with coffin handles, because all they will be is coffins for their crews. When I first came to Washington in 1973, I was quickly introduced to an old saying about the American armed forces: the Air Force is deceptive, the Navy is dishonest, and the Army is dumb. It seems some things never change. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism ON WAR # 20 Lies, Damned Lies And Military Intelligence It is now evident that Saddam Hussein's possession of vast quantities of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) is about as likely as Mars having canals, complete with gondolas and singing gondoliers. Remember, it wasn't just a couple of stink bombs we accused him of possessing. According to data compiled by columnist Nicholas Kristof, the governments of the United States and (once) Great Britain told the world that Saddam had 500 tons of mustard and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum, almost 30,000 banned munitions and the tornado that abducted Dorothy. So far, all we have found is two empty trailers. Presumably, American troops had sufficient time to paint over the "Allied Van Lines" logos. Since Saddam's WMD were one of the principal stated reasons for this strategically curious war, their absence is something more than a social faux pas. Were the American and British publics, as Pat Buchanan puts it, lied into war? If they were, it would not be the first time. In Britain, the practice goes back at least as far as the 18th century and the War of Jenkin's Ear. Americans were lied into World War I by cartoons of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies and into Vietnam by a Tonkin Gulf torpedo boat attack that never happened. There are, of course, other possibilities. It may have been simply an intelligence failure. That is the least disturbing possibility, because the others are worse. One is that someone in the chain of military intelligence deliberately cooked the books. If they did so, it was probably to curry favor with their political and budgetary masters, who let it be known what "findings" they wanted. This sort of corruption is now endemic in Washington. Virtually every Federal agency, including the armed forces, have accepted the rightness of doing and saying anything to get money. Budget size is the universal measurement of success, and whatever pleases those who allocate funds is wholesome and good. What John Boyd said of the Pentagon is now universal: "It is not true they have no strategy. They do have a strategy, and once you understand what it is, everything they do makes sense. The strategy is, `Don't interrupt the money flow; add to it.'" Another possibility is more disturbing still, and regrettably I have to say I think it is a certainty. Those who use military intelligence do not understand what it is. Throughout history, in virtually every conflict, a universal law has applied. That law says that when it comes to military intelligence, whatever you think you know is incomplete, and some of it is wrong. You don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, and you don't know what part of what you think you know is wrong. As part of the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs," which promises to turn war into a video game, many intelligence users, both military and civilian, have come to think of military intelligence as "hard data." RMA touts have long and loudly promised perfect information, on both your own side (in war, just knowing what your own forces are doing is difficult) and the enemy. The military talks about "information dominance" (for just a few more billions), which somehow suggests one of our attractive female officers, dressed in a natty leather outfit, serving as the G-2SM, the Information Dominatrix. It may be -- though I doubt it -- that our intelligence agencies really believed Saddam had all that stuff. But even if that is what they reported to the decision-makers, the decision-makers should have known better to swallow it. If they did not know that, they are not fit to be making military decisions. They lack the most basic understanding of the nature of military intelligence, a nature no technology can alter (and can easily make worse, by making the errors more convincing). The upshot is that we went to war and wrecked a country over something that, barring an unlikely revelation, was not true. The American people don't seem to care. Perhaps they expect to be misled by their government, or, more likely, they have just changed the channel. But the rest of the world does care. The international credibility of American assertions based on military intelligence is now zero. When we make claims about other countries -- as we are now doing about Iran -- not a soul will believe them, even when they happen to be true. At this point, Americans should not believe them either. Footnote: The U.S. is now moving rapidly to relocate its forces in South Korea well to the south of the DMZ. I suspect the real reason is to move them out of range of North Korean artillery. At present, if we launch airstrikes on North Korea, Pyongyang can respond with a massive, World War I-style artillery bombardment of U.S. ground troops that could kill thousands. The sudden withdrawal of Americans to positions south of the Han river reveals our intention to go after North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities. A possible North Korean riposte: demand Japan expel all American forces or kiss Osaka goodbye. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism ON WAR # 19 The Men Who Would Not Be King Normally, the position of Chief of Staff of the Army is the ultimate brass ring an Army officer can hope to grab. There is no higher Army job, and merely holding it guarantees a man at least a small place in the history books -- though not necessarily a favorable one. In fact, the last Army Chief of Staff to merit Clio's praise was General "Shy" Meyer, who held the post twenty years ago. Since he left, the Army has been stuck in a Brezhnevite "era of stagnation." It is therefore surprising that at present, no one seems willing to take the job, nor the position of Vice Chief. Both current incumbents leave this summer, and instead of the usual line of hopefuls standing hat in hand, the eligibles have headed for the hills. Rumor has it they may have to recruit the hall porter and the charwoman. The interesting question is why. Part of the answer is Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. To put it plainly, Rumsfeld treats people like crap. Working for him is like working for Leona Helmsley, except that Leona is less self-centered. Unless you are one of his sycophants, equipped with a good set of knee-pads and plenty of lip balm, you can expect to be booted down the stairs on a regular basis. Truth be told, some senior officers deserve to be treated that way, because that is how they always treated their subordinates. But Rummy does not discriminate between perfumed princes and the real thinkers and leaders. He has driven more than one of the latter to hang up his hat in disgust, to his service's and the nation's loss. But that is not the whole story. Part of the reason no one wants the Army's top job are two fundamental contradictions in the Administration's policy toward the Army. Unless they are resolved, any Army Chief of Staff will find himself in a difficult position. The first contradiction is that the Administration puts the Army last in line among the services at the same time that it is getting us into wars only the Army can fight. We are already fighting one Fourth Generation war in Afghanistan, we are becoming enmired up to our necks in another Fourth Generation war in Iraq, and we are sticking our noses into still more in the Philippines, maybe Indonesia, and possibly Iran. Only the Army can fight Fourth Generation war, to the degree anyone can (and no one really knows how). The Navy is irrelevant, the Air Force almost irrelevant, and the Marines want to get in and get out, fast, while Fourth Generation war plays itself out with agonizing slowness. Volens nolens, the Army is left holding the bag. Logically, that should make the Army the Administration's focus, its Schwerpunkt. Instead, OSD is in love with the Air Force, to the point where it wants to make the Army into a second Air Force, waging the high-tech, video-game warfare that exists only in the minds of children and Pentagon planners. That leads to the second contradiction. The Army needs and has long needed genuine military reform. Reform means such basic changes as adopting Third Generation, maneuver warfare doctrine and the culture of decentralization and initiative that goes with it; instituting a radically different personnel system that creates cohesive units, eliminates the bloat in the officer corps above the company grades and suppresses rather than mandates careerism; making free play training the norm rather than a rare exception; and getting rid of dual standards for men and women. Secretary Rumsfeld also preaches reform, but what he means by reform is just more of the high-tech illusion. Again, the Air Force is the model: the more a system costs and the more complex it is, the better it must be. The result is absurdities such as the Stryker, where Light Armored Vehicles, which are wonderful for operational maneuver, are instead to be used for urban combat where they will be instant coffins for their crews, and the Future Combat System, a conglomeration of robots, tanks, drones and kitchen sinks that surpasses anything envisioned by Rube Goldberg. Meanwhile, the real reforms so badly needed go unaddressed. In the face of all this, becoming Chief of Staff of the Army is somewhat less enticing than becoming mayor of Baghdad. But at the same time, it leaves the troops desperately in need of not just a Chief of Staff, but of a highly talented and morally courageous Chief of Staff, someone who can defend his men against the follies emanating from the civilian side of the Pentagon. Those who know him believe the current Vice Chief, General John M. "Jack" Keane, is such a man. Some think he could be the Army's Al Gray, the reforming Commandant of the Marine Corps of the early 1990s who left an enduring and powerful legacy. So far, General Keane is refusing the job, on the legitimate grounds of his wife's health problems. Many are praying he will reconsider. If the job goes instead to one of Rummy's lickspittles, God help our soldiers. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism ON WAR # 18 Of Time And The Rivers Whether the leaders and theoreticians of Fourth Generation forces such as al Quaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah have heard of John Boyd, I do not know. It would not surprise me if they have; they generally seem to make better use of open-source intelligence than do America's high-tech, closed-system intelligence agencies. [see Blaster #438]. In any event, like Boyd, they do understand that war is conducted in time as well as in space, and that time is often the more important dimension. A recent article in The American Conservative is titled, "God's Time: The Afghan war is over when the Afghans say so." The author, Jim Pittaway, makes the point that Fourth Generation, non-state Islamic forces have a wholly different view of time than does America. Of Afghan guerillas fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, he writes, For more than a decade, they had been enduring the privations of life in the bush, organizing defenses, and preparing strategies that would ultimately lead them to success against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a global superpower … this idea of being on "God's time" led to an extraordinary degree of patience... The same is true now that many of these same Fourth Generation fighters face American opponents: As surely as the American soldiers and society will want to win and go home, these men do not need victory or closure in any comparable sense in order to justify their ongoing fight … Adversity, discouragement, and setbacks are never defeat; defeat is an epistemological impossibility except in the event that one ceases to believe … It is not his job to drive the "coalition" out; his job is to make them pay. Allah will see that they are driven out when it is his will to do so. War on "God's time" has already fought us to a stalemate in Afghanistan, with very little fighting. Our puppet government in Kabul has failed to extend its authority beyond that city. Indeed, last week's mob assault on the American embassy, sparked by the mistaken killing of four Afghan Army soldiers by Marine embassy guards, shows that its ability to control its capital is shaky at best. The promised American "rebuilding" of Afghanistan has become a stale joke, because without security, nothing can be rebuilt. And America hasn't a clue on how to provide security in Afghanistan. Or Baghdad, for that matter. Now, having found that M-1 tanks make poor police patrol cars, we are proposing to put a lot more American troops on Baghdad streets, in Humvees and on foot. Welcome to my parlor, say the Ba'athist and Shiite spiders to the fly. One RPG round will incinerate any Humvee, and foot patrols will be even easier game. When that happens, we will be back in the tanks, and someone else will control the streets. We could have used Iraq's own army for that purpose, but instead we have sent it home, without pay, providing a vast reservoir of fighters for our enemies. America's "plan" for occupying Iraq seems to have been to identify every possible mistake, then make it. The American authorities in Baghdad claim to be restoring order, getting the economy moving, fixing the infrastructure, etc., but the Iraqi people don't seem to see any of it. We begin to sound like Saddam's Minister of Information. In fact, if he's still around, perhaps we should hire him. Already, American casualties are rising. Instead of bringing the troops home, we are sending in more. Those are not the usual signs of a war won. In the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, time belongs to our opponents, not to us. We, not they, need closure. Our time is determined by American election cycles. They operate on "God's time." If they do not win today, or even fight today, there are many tomorrows—for them, but not for us. If Iraq is still a mess and there is no end in sight a year from now, George Bush is in trouble. The fly has occupied the flypaper. And time is always on the flypaper's side. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism ON WAR # 14 Don't Take John Boyd's Name In Vain Some senior American military officers and a number of military commentators are now saying that America's swift victory in the first phase of the war with Iraq shows that the U.S. armed forces have learned the lessons John Boyd tried to teach them. As someone who knew and worked with John Boyd, I have to say, not so fast. There is a lot less here than meets the eye. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism ON WAR # 10 The Duke Of Medina Sidonia In planning a war, the most important task is to understand what can be planned and what cannot. In general, the initial disposition of forces can be planned, and it must be planned with great care. As Field Marshal von Moltke said, "A mistake in initial dispositions can seldom be put right." But Moltke also said, "No plan survives its first contact with the enemy." Once you cross the enemy's border, you have to adjust and improvise constantly. The conduct of war, as distinct from preparation for war, is (Moltke again) "a matter of expedients." Count von Schlieffen thought otherwise, and in the famous Schlieffen Plan he attempted to extend the logic of railway mobilization planning into the campaign itself. Not surprisingly, the result was failure and, for Germany, a lost war. A second planning error is to make the war plan depend on a single assumption. Here, the Spanish Armada provides an example. The single assumption on which the Armada depended was that the Spanish commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma, would somehow get his own army to the sea and out into the English Channel, where the Armada would protect its crossing. The Armada's commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, did everything he was expected to do. He brought his fleet into the Channel in splendid order, ready to convey Parma's troops. But Parma never came. All Medina Sidonia could do was try to get home (he made it, with his flagship and a goodly portion of his fleet). Yet a third error in planning is to assume that the enemy will fight the way you would. The classic example here is Napoleon's march to Moscow. Napoleon knew he would have fought a great battle to keep the enemy from taking his capital. But Tsar Alexander did not do that (he fought at Borodino, but was careful not to let his army be destroyed there). He let Napoleon take Moscow, moving the Russian army east and south. Then, he waited. Baffled, Napoleon had no choice but to march back the way he came -- losing nine-tenths of his army in the process. How does our current war with Iraq look, if we examine it in light of these three errors in military planning? Regrettably, not very good. Normally, the American military can be counted on to plan initial deployments thoroughly, and, once again, it did. But the Pentagon threw the plan out at the last minute, resulting in chaos. James Kitfield wrote in the March 28 National Journal,
This mess was multiplied by the Schlieffen error: we had a rigid plan for the campaign itself, and did not adjust it despite changes in the situation. Specifically, when the Turks said no to the passage of American forces through Turkey, putting an end to the planned northern front, we continued with the rest of the plan as if nothing had changed. The result at this point is a campaign that looks like a balloon on a string, with a single Army division (about 3,500 combat troops) deep in Iraq and a slender thread of a supply line connecting it to its food, water, fuel and ammunition. The First Marine Division is slowly putting itself in the same situation. No classical strategist can see the picture without his hair standing on end. On top of all that, like the Armada, our plan depended on a single assumption: that the Iraqis would not fight. Unfortunately, they are fighting, leaving General Franks in the position of the Duke of Medina Sidonia. One division was enough to accept the surrender of Baghdad, but one division is far from enough to take Baghdad. One hates to say so, but the fact that the Iraqis are fighting has caused our initial campaign plan to collapse. Finally, we seem to have assumed that the Iraqis would fight as we would, relying primarily on their heavy armor units. Instead, they have fallen back on the age-old Arab tradition of light cavalry warfare, directed against our rear. Arabs have a dismal record in tank battles, but at light cavalry warfare, they are quite good. We might recall that an Englishman named Lawrence used Arabs that way against the Turks, with pretty decent results. The pitfalls in planning a war or a campaign are many. History does, however, warn us what some of them are. Perhaps it is time for Clio to ask Mr. Rumsfeld why he fell into three of the most obvious anyway. ON WAR #9 No Exit In June of 1944, when Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the German commander in France, was told that the Allies were landing in Normandy, he knew exactly what to do. He went out into the garden and pruned his roses. Von Rundstedt knew that in war, early reports, regardless of whether the news is good or bad, are usually misleading. Reacting to them with "instant analysis" merely makes the problem worse. That is as true for the war in Iraq as for any other war. For now, we need to wait. Only time can offer clarity. What we can do now is discuss possibilities. I see three broad, possible outcomes to this war. None of them is good. The first and worst is that our current advance on Baghdad proves to be a trap. We get there, our 350-mile single supply line is cut, and the 3rd Infantry Division, which is the spearhead, is forced into a desperate retreat or even surrender. Could it happen? Yes. As the Iraqi leadership seems to understand, a modern defense does not try to keep the enemy out. Rather, it seeks to suck him in, then cut him off. This type of defense was first developed by the German army during World War I (early critics called it the "let them walk right in defense"), and it was the standard German defense during World War II. The key element, the counterattack by armored forces, will probably be impossible for the Iraqis because of air power. But there are other ways to cut a supply line. This outcome is disastrous in both the short and long terms. Short-term, we lose an army. Long-term, the Islamic world gets what it might see as its biggest victory since the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. It would be an enormous shot in the arm for every Islamic jihadi, and would lead to a collapse of America's position throughout the Islamic world, and perhaps elsewhere as well. The second broad possibility is that we take Baghdad, replace Saddam with an American-approved pro-consul, then watch Iraq turn into a vast West Bank as non-state elements take effective control outside the capital city. This is what has happened in Afghanistan, and in Iraq too we would quickly find that our state armed forces do not know how to fight non-state opponents in Fourth Generation war. This outcome is good short-term but—as Israel can attest—a bloody mess in the long-term. The third possibility is what the adventurers who now run American foreign and defense policy seek: we take Baghdad, liberate Iraq and turn it into a modern, peaceful democracy. The probability of this happening makes a snowball's chances in Hell look pretty good, but even if it does, it too is a long-term disaster. Why? First, because democracy in the Islamic world probably means the election of people like Bin Laden, whose campaign slogan would be, "Death to the Christian and Jewish dogs!" Second, because what the American Establishment means by "freedom and democracy" is Brave New World. And third, because the adventurers, emboldened by success, might then go on to wage war against Iran, Syria, Libya, and possibly North Korea. If their goal is American world hegemony, that goal is certain to drive everyone else into a coalition against us, state and non-state elements alike. In short, so long as American policy remains what it is today, the war in Iraq offers us no exit. If the adventurers were replaced by sober men, could we find a way out? Perhaps. It just might work if we took Baghdad, overthrew Saddam, and then immediately turned Iraq over to the Arab League or the U.N. to run, while making it very clear to the rest of the world that America's quest for world hegemony is over, finished and done. A good way to put it might be, "a republic, not an empire." Meanwhile, let us all pray that possibility number one does not come to pass, and that our friends over there doing the fighting—and I have many—come home to us whole, safe, victorious and soon. ON WAR # 8 Hippos Can't Tap Dance The March 16 Washington Post outlined what it believes to be the current plan for a war with Iraq. In a piece sublined "Bold War Plan Emphasizes Lightning Attacks and Complex Logistics," the Post quotes an unnamed general as saying, "We literally could be in Baghdad in three or four days." In an obvious reference to the German Blitzkrieg style of warfare, the article goes on to say that the ground forces coiled in Kuwait—including the 3rd Infantry Division, the 101st Airborne Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force—anticipate attacking with Patton-like audacity. Roughly 350 miles of road separate the northern border of Kuwait from Baghdad, and substantial mechanized forces are expected to be on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital within a few days... Two particular risks come with this war plan, one obvious, at least in part, the other subtle. The obvious risk is that U.S. forces will have a 350-mile supply line. That supply line is a lucrative target for anything and everything, ranging from guerilla war through counter-thrusts by Iraqi armor to attacks by chemical or biological weapons. While the risk here is obvious, there is a dimension to it that is not— because "Political Correctness" forbids talking about it. In today's U.S. military, the supply line is full of women. History suggests that if rear-echelon units, where women may make up 20% or 30% of the personnel, are attacked, two things will happen, then a third. The two things are, first, the women will panic, and second, the men will forget about their mission in order to rescue and comfort the women. Both acts are built into human nature, and no military regulations or orders can overrule them. The third thing that will happen as a consequence of the other two is that the rear area will dissolve in chaos. An interesting if little-known military fact is that, from the days of the Greek phalanx onward, most military units that collapse do so from the rear forward, not from the front back. If the American supply line deep inside Iraq collapses, so will the combat forces up front, in part because they will run out of fuel and bullets and in part for psychological reasons. Simply put, when you feel cut off you want to run away, and sometimes you do. The subtle risk that comes with this Blitzkrieg-type war plan is that Blitzkrieg requires a Third Generation, German-model military and America has Second Generation, French-model armed forces.* Directing Second Generation forces to do Blitzkrieg is asking hippos to tap dance. They may want to, but they just can't. The problem is that fast-moving warfare requires fast decision-making, not just rapid movement by columns of armored vehicles. Unless everything goes exactly according to plan—and wars seldom do—commanders at every level must adapt often and rapidly. But our hierarchical, process-oriented military decision process, dominated by vast staffs, misleading virtual realities and political generals, does not permit local commanders to adapt. As is essential in Second Generation warfare, the duty of commanders at all but the most senior levels is to follow the plan. At those most senior levels, a cynic might suggest that the main question is whether Saddam's political generals are even worse than our own. Through all the years when the military reformers were attempting to lead America's armed forces from the Second Generation of modern war into the Third -- and, sadly, failing—I warned that you cannot take the head of one and put it on the body of the other. You cannot give a Second Generation military a Third Generation, maneuver warfare plan or doctrine and expect it to execute. Third Generation armed forces are radically different as institutions: in their personnel systems, their training, their manpower and promotion policies, their institutional cultures (the best book on the subject is Martin van Creveld's Fighting Power). Yet, if the Washington Post account is accurate, that is now what the Administration has ordered its armed forces to do. Unless the enemy does not fight, or fights according to our plan, the result is likely to be watching hippos try to tap dance. It won't be pretty. Footnote: The same issue of the Washington Post reported on a new, "mysterious, sometimes fatal pneumonia-like illness" that poses "a worldwide threat after spreading from Asia to Europe and North America." This may or may not be the first attack by the 21st century's most deadly weapon of mass destruction, a genetically engineered disease. Even if it is not, it is a timely warning about how some Fourth Generation opponents are likely to counter America's vaunted "technological superiority." As I have said before, war is a two-way street. * First Generation warfare relies on massed manpower; Second Generation on massed firepower. Both First and Second Generation warfare are essentially linear. Third Generation warfare shifts to non-linear tactics based on speed and flexibility. Fourth Generation warfare is also non-linear; the fighting is conducted by non-state forces unbound by the rules of conventional warfare. However, the strategic objectives of Fourth Generation warriors extend beyond mere terrorism, which is only a technique. ON WAR # 7 Some German Lessons Between 1809 and 1945, the Prussian and, later, German armies developed what is often called maneuver warfare of Third Generation warfare. For the past quarter century, the U.S. military has been trying to adopt this German way of war, and failing. Instead, we now appear to be copying two fatal German mistakes: thinking that a lower level of war trumps a higher, and initiating a war on two fronts. There are several ways of defining levels of war. One is John Boyd's trinity of moral, mental and physical. Another is the more traditional strategic, operational and tactical. One of the reasons Germany lost both world wars was that she thought operational excellence would trump strategic failure. In reality, a higher level of war always trumps a lower. America seems now to have taken this German error and extended it. The present American way of war assumes that superiority at the tactical (or perhaps merely technical) level, manifested in high technology, will overcome massive failures at the strategic and moral levels. Strategically, a war with Iraq will help, not hurt, our real enemies, non-state forces such as al-Quaeda. Morally, we are launching an aggressive war against a weak enemy for no clear reason. Putting the two together leads to self-isolation, which is exactly what happened to Germany. The notion that Wunderwaffe will somehow overcome isolation and strategic failure will prove as viable for Washington now as it did for Germany in 1944-45. Not content with duplicating just one fatal German mistake, we are moving to add a second by getting into a war on two fronts. Our eastern front may be Korea. The situation there is steadily getting hotter, and Washington's response so far has been to pretend it is not happening while saying Kim Jong II is a nut case. Strategically, what North Korea is doing makes perfect sense. North Korea knows it is part of the "axis of evil," and it sees the United States preparing to attack another member of that axis, Iraq. The same voices in Washington that have demanded war with Iraq are beginning to make noises about Iran, accusing it of attempting to develop nuclear weapons and suggesting it should be next on the hit list. If I were a North Korean general, I would certainly assume an American attack is at some point a very real possibility, perhaps an inevitability. On that basis, North Korea has decided it needs one of two things: a formal, legally binding non-aggression pact with the United States, or nuclear weapons. Washington has turned the idea of a non-aggression pact down flat, which can only lead to greater fear in Pyongyang. So, North Korea is going to build nukes. What other choice does it have? Everyone in the region—Russia, China, Japan and even South Korea—is desperately urging Washington to talk with North Korea. Washington continues to refuse. Adding fuel to what may soon become a conflagration, President Bush last week spoke openly about the possibility of a military "solution" to the problem of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Far from solving anything, such an action would probably give us a two-front war. As was the case with Germany, a war on two fronts would leave the American military stretched dangerously thin. Our war plan for Korea assumes South Korea will carry the main burden of a war while Japan offers safe logistical bases. But those assumptions could prove wrong. North Korea has indicated it might attack American forces in the region while offering peace with South Korea; the new South Korean president has said that if the U.S. and North Korea went to war, South Korea might offer to mediate. A North Korean threat of a nuke on Osaka might leads Japan to declare neutrality, in which case we could not use Japanese bases. In such a situation, our options might be initiating the use of nuclear weapons or trying to stage a Dunkirk. Either one would be yet another strategic disaster. It would be an historical oddity if the United States, having failed to copy the Germans in what they got right, instead duplicated what they got wrong. In view of the almost lighthearted military optimism that currently prevails in Washington, one cannot help remembering Marx's comment about history occurring as tragedy, then repeating itself as farce. ON WAR # 6: A Warning From Clausewitz An American war on Iraq now seems certain. Even if Saddam Hussein agrees to step down and go into exile, it is not clear that Washington would forgo the occupation of Iraq and the installation of an American military government. Wilsonianism is in full flower, in what is likely to prove a false spring. As we watch events unfold, it may be useful to keep two points in mind. First, the center of gravity of this war—the place or places where a decision is likely to occur—are not in Iraq. As is also true of the war in Afghanistan, the centers of gravity of a war with Iraq are in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Of these three, Pakistan is the most important. Strategically, Iraq is not a key to very much. One might argue that as Iraq goes, so goes Syria, but that is not saying a lot. Iraq is not a key to Iran; on the contrary, their rivalry goes back centuries. All Iraq means to Turkey is an increased threat of an independent Kurdish state and maybe a chance to grab Iraq's northern oil fields. The notion that an American-conquered Iraq can blossom into a Swiss-style democracy that will remake the Middle East comes from Cloud Coockoo Land. If you want to see what democracy in that region would really mean for American interests, look at the Turkish parliament's vote this weekend against allowing U.S. forces to invade Iraq from Turkey. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, in contrast, are keys to many other things. Pakistan has nukes, Saudi Arabia controls world oil prices and Egypt offers Israel its only hope of some kind of (temporary) deal with the Arabs. If the pro-western regime in any of those nations falls, we will have suffered a strategic disaster. If they all go, our position in the region will collapse. The central strategic question, therefore, is what effect an American attack on Iraq will have on the stability and tenure of the Pakistani, Saudi and Egyptian regimes. That leads to point number two: if and when American forces capture Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein, the real war will not end but begin. It will be fought in Iraq in part, as an array of non-state elements begin to fight America and each other. It will be fought in part in the rest of the Islamic world where the targets will not only be Americans but any local regime that is friendly to America. And, of course, it will be fought here in America, as the sons of Mohammed remind Americans that war is a two-way street. This kind of war, Fourth Generation war, is something American and other state armed forces do not know how to fight. It is not going to go well, and among the casualties are likely to be the pro-American governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In short, an American victory over the state of Iraq (which is itself no sure thing) is more likely to lead to a strategic failure for America than to a strategic success. In a somewhat more famous On War, Clausewitz wrote: The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman and Commander have to make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking: neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive. With the invasion of Iraq, Washington is trying to turn a Fourth Generation war, a war with non-state entities, into a Second Generation war, a war against another state that can be conquered by the simple application of firepower to targets. If Clausewitz were still with us, I suspect he would warn that we are marching toward Jena* Jena was the battle where Napoleon decisively defeated Prussia in 1806. ON WAR # 5 War Against Everyone, Everywhere? In what increasingly appears to be Washington's war against everyone, everywhere, 3,000 American troops are now in the Philippines where they are to fight a small Islamic rebel group called Abu Sayyaf. Abu Sayyaf is supposed to have about 200 fighters; an American victory would seem to be assured. But here is where we are likely to find that war is changing. When the U.S. Army was fighting Philippine insurgents a hundred years ago, the Philippine forces tried to fight stand-up battles, copying the Western way of war. Not surprisingly, they lost. I suspect Abu Sayyaf will address the problem differently, in a way that reflects non-Western approaches to war. If they do, we are likely to see a conflict that unfolds along the same general lines as the war in Afghanistan— which is not going well (by some reports, we have been forced out of five forts on the Afghan-Pakistan border; we have admitted the loss of one). What will happen? First, when the Americans appear, Abu Sayyaf will disappear. They will refuse to engage us, and simply blend back in to the civilian population. The American way of war, which is Second Generation warfare, is based on putting fire on targets. Abu Sayyaf will respond by making itself untargetable. Second, Abu Sayyaf will wait. It will know that time is on its side. Why? Because it lives there, and we will eventually go home. But its waiting will be watchful waiting. It will watch our forces to determine their patterns of operation—what they do, and when and how they do it. Second Generation warfare tactics are formulistic; they follow set patterns (which really means our Second Generation military confuses tactics with techniques). That makes us predictable—the same thing that led to our humiliation in Mogadishu. Once Abu Sayyaf has determined our patterns, it will move to take advantage of them. It will not offer us the stand-up battle we want; it will still try to remain untargetable. But we will suffer from a landmine here, an ambush there, a grenade tossed into a humvee somewhere else. We will begin taking casualties. But each time we reach out and try to grab them, we will come up with a handful of air. Abu Sayyaf may never escalate beyond this sort of petite guerre, as it used to be called. The U.S. will not lose, but neither will it win. And as the conflict continues, Abu Sayyaf will take advantage of the greatest recruiting tool it was ever given: our presence. To Philippine nationalists, we will be foreign invaders. To Islamics in the southern Philippines, where Abu Sayyaf operates, we will also be Christian dogs, crusaders. To everyone, even the local people fighting against Abu Sayyaf, we will gradually become bullies, as we fight a weak enemy with attack helicopters, jet aircraft with smart bombs, the whole panoply of American firepower (the best book on that subject, Firepower in Limited War, makes one basic point: don't use it). What if we get lucky and take out the leadership of Abu Sayyaf? New leaders and different organizations will take up the fight. In the Philippines as elsewhere, the spread of Fourth Generation warfare (remember, America's armed forces are still stuck in the Second Generation) means more and more people are transferring their primary loyalty away from the state to other entities and causes. For those new loyalties, they will fight. If America is going to send in Marines or Special Forces against all Fourth Generation forces it can find, we will indeed find ourselves fighting against everyone, everywhere (keep your eyes on Columbia for the next round). Washington fails to see the danger because Washington defines the problem as merely "terrorism." Terrorism is only a technique, and what we are really facing is the greatest change in warfare since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 gave the state the monopoly on war it is now losing. Remember, if you don't get the question right, your answer doesn't matter. ON WAR # 4 Is Washington Playing At War? When I had lunch last week with the thoughtful foreign policy columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, the first thing she asked me was, "Can you make any sense out of what is going on?" I assured her that, like most of the people I know, I could not. Washington seems hell-bent on war with Iraq, and nobody (including my friends in the military) understands why. Secretary of State Powell's speech to the U.N. did not answer the question. Considering that we are talking about war here, the grounds he offered for it were trifling. It brought to mind the War of Jenkins' Ear, when in the 18th century England declared war on Spain over the ear of a British merchant captain named Jenkins, supposedly sliced off his head by a Spanish coast guardsman (Jenkins presented the ear, pickled in a bottle, to Parliament). After the war was over, no one really understood why it had been fought. The mismatch between causes and means raises a deeply troubling question: is Washington playing at war? Make no mistake: war is the most perilous and unpredictable of all human endeavors. Playing with war is more dangerous than playing with fire, because fire can usually be contained; war, too often, cannot. Wars have an unpleasant habit of evolving in ways that none of the participants anticipated. When, in the summer of 1914, Europe resounded with cries of "A Berlin!" or "Nach Paris!", no one imagined the Somme, or Verdun, or the starvation blockade of Germany that killed 750,000 civilians. The sense that Washington is playing at war is strengthened if we analyze the politics. If the Bush Administration were in desperate political trouble, one could at least see a rationale for a wild gamble on war. But politically, the Administration could hardly be riding higher. It just gained strength in Congress in an off-year election, a rare event. Bush's poll numbers are more than comfortable. Yet the White House is risking it all on a single throw of the dice. If this war goes badly, it is the end of George W. Bush and any hope of a Republican ascendancy for the next twenty years. Our next President might well be Hillary Clinton. Mr. Rumsfeld recently said that a war with Iraq would be over in six days or perhaps six weeks; it almost certainly would not last six months. Here, too one senses someone playing at war. What if Iraq fights in the cities, where the built environment negates "hi-tech" weaponry? What if we take Baghdad, only to have a suitcase nuke go off in Seattle? What if Willie says to Joe, "Hey, Joe, you got a case of the sniffles?", and we find thousands of our troops dying from a genetically engineered disease? All these possibilities are quite real. But the War Party in Washington dismisses them with a shrug. If anyone should be cautious about playing at war, it is conservatives. The greatest conservative catastrophe in the 20th Century was World War I. The three conservative monarchies that had kept the poisons of the French Revolution in check through the 19th century, Russia, Prussia and Austria, were all swept away by that disastrous war. As the Marxist historian Arno Mayer has correctly argued, the result was a vast spectrum shift to the left. Before World War I, America and France, because they were republics, represented the international left. By 1919, they represented the international right, not because they had changed, but because the world had shifted around them. The reason Americans today find themselves living in a moral and cultural sewer, is, in the end, World War I. Then, too, in that fateful summer of 1914, governments played at war. Austria saw a chance to restore her image as a Great Power. Russia perceived an opportunity to take revenge on Austria for her humiliation in the Bosnian Annexation Crisis of 1908. The Kaiser, rightly, told the Chief of the German General Staff, Moltke the younger, that he wanted to stay on the defensive in the west and attack in the east, which would have kept Britain out of the war. Moltke collapsed on a couch and said it could not be done (the plans were actually in the file), and the Kaiser gave in. Everyone agreed that the troops would be home before the leaves fell. Four miserable years and millions of dead later, the Kaiser was an exile in Holland, the Tsar and his family were dead and Austria-Hungary had ceased to exist. The British empire had bled to death in the mud of Flanders, and on the streets of Paris, there were no young men. The future belonged to people no one had ever heard of, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. If there is a game conservatives should never allow their government to play, it is playing at war. ON WAR # 2 Will The Enemy Fight? Last week, I looked at the moral level of war from the American perspective. Now I want to turn the telescope around: how does this war look at the moral level—the highest and most powerful level of war—from an Iraqi perspective? Of course, I have to speculate: Iraq is not big on opinion polls. But the question is important, because it relates directly to whether or nor Iraqis fight us when we invade their country. The key to our almost bloodless success in the first Gulf War was the fact that the most Iraqi soldiers did not fight (the Republican Guard did, but we did not encounter many Guard units). Make no mistake: if the Iraqis do fight this time, the second Gulf War will be very different from the first. Washington is so confident that the Iraqis will not fight that our operational plan depends on them not doing so. We will invade Iraq with a force as small as two Army divisions and one division from the Marine Corps. That is enough Americans to take Iraq's surrender, but nowhere near enough to defeat Iraq if Iraqis fight (which also says that our operational plan is very fragile.). Washington's reason for believing the Iraqis will not fight is moral: Saddam is a tyrant, and many, perhaps most Iraqis hate him. They will welcome as liberators anyone who promises to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That may prove correct. But counting on it could prove dangerous. Many Iraqis may feel, "Yea, Saddam is an SOB, but at least he is our SOB." Not without reason, Iraqis may see our invasion having more to do with oil than with spreading democracy. Nationalism and tribalism may also work for Saddam, as many people unite to fight a foreign invader. After all, an earlier Saddam Hussein named Joe Stalin was also a tyrant. Many Russians hated him. Many welcomed the Germans and even fought for Germany against the Soviet Union. But enough Russians stayed loyal for Stalin to win that war. We also need to ask, "Which Iraqis are we talking about?" The Kurds, in northern Iraq, are unlikely to fight for Saddam, unless he seems to be winning. Their real fear, in any case, is ending up inside Turkey after Iraq breaks apart. In the south of Iraq, the Shiites have suffered heavily under Saddam; they may welcome us, or at least stay neutral. But Iraq's real military, the Republican Guard, is made up almost entirely of Sunnis from the middle of the country. By saying we will bring democracy to Iraq, we are also saying that we will throw the Sunnis out of power, since they are a minority. In a country like Iraq, if you lose political power, you lose everything else too, including maybe your life. My bet is that the Sunnis will fight us. If they fight us in the cities, this will not be an easy war. Perhaps the most important question, looking at the moral level of war from the other side's perspective, is not what Iraqis think, but how this war will look in the larger Islamic world. Here, the U.S. has some important strikes against it, even if no one loves Saddam. We are a powerful country attacking a weak country (and offering no credible reason for doing so). We are a rich country bringing more misery to a poor country. We boast that because of our technology, we can wage a war in safety, killing other people while taking no risks ourselves. And we are seen as a Christian country (would we still were) attacking a Moslem country. This could bring us serious trouble in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. The most critical place to watch is Pakistan. If the current pro-American government of Pakistan is ousted and replaced with one aligned with Islamic non-state forces against the West, the whole American position in the region will collapse. Osama or his buddies will have nukes and the most competent conventional armed forces in the Islamic world. If that occurs, we will have lost even if we take Baghdad and hang Saddam Hussein from a sour apple tree. One vignette of how this war may look from the Sunni Iraqi perspective comes from an incident in the first Gulf War, told to me by a U.S. Marine who witnessed it. The Marines were attacked by a small unit of the Republican Guard. They shot up the lead Iraqi personnel carrier, which caught fire. The Republican Guard infantry poured out of it on fire, and assaulted the Marines as they burned. One Iraqi was shot numerous times, but did not fall. A Marine finally brought him down with a football tackle and beat out the flames on his back. With the American Marines standing around him, the Iraqi sat up and said in perfect English, "I am thirsty, and I love Saddam." And he died. I guarantee you that those Marines respected their enemy. Before this is over, Washington may come to do the same. "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation" by William S. Lind, Colonel Keith Nightengale (U.S. Army), Captain John F. Schmitt (U.S. Marine Corps), Colonel Joseph W. Sutton (U.S. Army), and Lieutenant Colonel Gary I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps Reserves). Marine Corps Gazette. October 1989. "Fourth Generation Warfare: Another Look" by Lind, Schmitt, and Wilson. Marine Corps Gazette. December 1994. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism ON WAR # 1 Can A Government Wage War Without Popular Support? Beginning this Tuesday, January 28, 2003, I will offer an "On War" commentary each week until the Iraq business is over and done. I suspect that may be awhile. Who am I? At present, I am a center director at the Free Congress Foundation. But in 1976 I began the debate over maneuver warfare that became a central part of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps finally adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the late `80s (I wrote most of their new tactics manual). In 1989, I began the debate over Fourth Generation warfare—war waged by non-state entities—which is what paid us a visit on September 11, 2001. The article I co-authored then for the Marine Corps Gazette was formally cited last year by al Quaeda, who said, "This is our doctrine." My Maneuver Warfare Handbook, published in 1985, is now used by military academies all over the world, and I lecture internationally on military strategy, doctrine and tactics. In this series, I propose to look at what is happening—with Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan and other outposts of the new American imperium—from the standpoint of military theory. Hopefully, that will enable us all to make sense out of the bits and pieces we get each day as "news." One of the most important things military theory offers to this end is a framework developed by Col. John Boyd, USAF, who was the greatest military theorist America ever produced. Col. Boyd said that war is fought at three levels: moral, mental and physical. The moral level is the most powerful, the physical level is the least powerful, and the mental level is in between. The American way of war, which is Second Generation warfare—there will be more on the Four Generations of Modern War in future commentaries—is physical: "putting steel on target," as our soldiers like to say. But how does the coming war with Iraq look at the moral level? Here, the U.S. seems to be leading with its chin. Why? Because the Administration in Washington has yet to come up with a convincing rationale for why the United States should attack Iraq. The argument that Iraq, a small, poor (it didn't used to be, but it is now), Third World country halfway around the world is a direct threat to the U.S.A. is not credible. Yes, Saddam probably has some chemical and biological weapons. But few tyrants are bent on suicide, and the notion that he would use them to attack the United States, except in self-defense, makes no sense. Nor does it seem likely he would give them to non-state actors like al Quaeda—again, except in self-defense—because non-state forces and Fourth Generation warfare are as much a threat to him as to us. It is of course true that Saddam is a tyrant (his model, by the way, is obviously Stalin, not Hitler). So what? Mesopotamia has been ruled by tyrants since before history began, and it will be ruled by tyrants long after North America is once again tribal territories. The last President who tried to export democracy on American bayonets was Woodrow Wilson. That's one of the reasons he counts as America's worst President, ever. Very few people, in America or the rest of the world, wish to see us revive the practice. Most importantly, the real threat we face is the Fourth Generation, non-state players such as al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. They can only benefit from an American war against Iraq—regardless of how it turns out. If we win, the state is further discredited in the Islamic world, and more young men give their allegiance to non-state forces. If Saddam wins, their own governments look even less legitimate, because they failed to stand with him against the hated Crusaders. A recent cartoon showed Osama bin Laden, dressed as Uncle Sam, saying, "I want you to invade Iraq!" Undoubtedly, he does. So what is the real reason for this war? Oil? Revenge for Saddam surviving the first Gulf War? Israel? The ordinary Americans I know are wondering, because the reasons stated by the Administration don't add up. Military theory says that, in a democracy, a government cannot successfully wage war unless the war has popular support. In turn, a war cannot obtain popular support if the people do no understand why it is being fought. Today, the people, at home and overseas, do not understand why America wants to go to war with Iraq. That means the Administration is losing this war before the first bomb is dropped.
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