GW Theory Cast Too High?

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the rich intellectual debate broiling this past month in the ‘blogosphere over the construct of the “generational” model of warfare: from D5GW host Curtis Gale Weeks to co-contributors tdaxp (several posts and more) & General of the Hordes Subadei, Younghusband (twice) at Coming Anarchy, Smitten Eagle (channeled by Lexington Green), Fabius Maximus (who also critiqued a Friedman piece from STRATFOR), Arms and Influence, Stephen Pampinella (twice), and Skilluminati.

Much of these analyses focus on the implicitly ordinal nature of the “generational” model.  tdaxp’s lucid post on “The Terminology of XGW” attempts to overcome this fundamental shortcoming in the model, but doesn’t go far enough in jettisoning the troublesome implication.  His recommendation to abandon “generation” in favor of “grade” — or, later, “gradient” — still connotes an ordinal nature of the methods of warfare.

Recent efforts to diminish my “anti-library” (which have proven fruitless, since my propensity for borrowing books exceeds the rate by which I actually read and return them) has me deep into Karen Armstrong’s outstanding biography, “Muhammad”.  Early in chapter 1 (“Muhammad the Enemy”), Prof. Armstrong describes the 9th century monk Perfectus of Cordova, in Andalusia (née the capital of the Muslim state of al-Andalus).  His diatribe against the Prophet of Islam warranted a death sentence, and inspired dozens of others from all levels of society to similarly insult Muhammad — and receive similar fates from the Qadi.

Perfectus, his contemporaries Eulogio and Alvaro, and the many other “Cordovan martyrs” had been influenced by an apocalyptic biography of Muhammad that (with extensive artistic liberties) linked the Prophet of Islam to the “Great Deceiver” predicted in the Apostle Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians.  The association of Muhammad with the “… rebel [who] would establish his rule in the Temple of Jerusalem and mislead many Christians with his plausible doctrines” (2 Thes. 1:4-8, cited in Armstrong’s Muhammad, p. 24), and with John’s Book of Revelation through “selective addition” (claiming Muhammad died in the year 666 — even though he lived another 38 years), were what we may call a “5th generation war”: a secret war that exploited cultural icons in order to diminish and defeat an opponent.

My personal epiphany, while reading Armstrong in the midst of the ongoing ‘blog dialog (diablog?), is that none of the “generational” models are necessarily exclusive — nor for that matter are they strategic.  Rather, they are simply tactical methods that one may choose to apply in the achievement of an objective or the fulfillment of a task.

Consider George Friedman’s recent STRATFOR analysis on Secretary Gates’s dismissal of CSAF Mosely and SAF Wynne, where he describes the GMW put forth by Lind, Nightengale, Schmitt, Sutton and Wilson in their groundbreaking 1989 Marine Corps GAZETTE article:

“There is a school of thought in the military that argues that we have now entered the fourth generation of warfare. The first generation of war, according to this theory, involved columns and lines of troops firing muzzle-loaded weapons in volleys. The second generation consisted of warfare involving indirect fire (artillery) and massed movement, as seen in World War I. Third-generation warfare comprised mobile warfare, focused on outmaneuvering the enemy, penetrating enemy lines and encircling them, as was done with armor during World War II. The first three generations of warfare involved large numbers of troops, equipment and logistics. Large territorial organizations — namely, nation-states — were required to carry them out.  … Fourth-generation warfare is warfare carried out by nonstate actors using small, decentralized units and individuals to strike at enemy forces and, more important, create political support among the population.

Whether a commander chooses to align his forces in columns (a staple of “close order drill”, one of the most basic elements of modern day “Basic Training” in the armed services), or to mass fires, or to exploit maneuver, or to focus on “creating political support among the population” as GEN Petraeus is doing with “the Surge”, the fact of the matter is that ALL of these are valid tactics at some point.  In fact, I submit that the methods are force structure neutral in many respects — albeit some force structures are optimized for certain methods. 

The crux of the matter is that warfare is no longer the sole purview of the nation-state.  The proliferation of information technologies and ready access to design “best practices” is collapsing the barriers to entry in the bazaar of violence, as John Robb has been telling us for some time.  Even seemingly advanced weapon systems like cruise missiles (the “rich man’s IED”) will soon become accessible to self-subsidized organizations with DIY ingenuity, GPS-enabled cell phones and a modicum of propellant and guidance.  And we have all seen the power of networks for manipulating and influencing perceptions.

While the nation-state is optimized for the first of Boyd’s three “Categories of Conflict” (Attrition, Maneuver and Moral [q.v. Patterns of Conflict, p. 113, cited by Younghusband]), the latter two have very low barriers to entry and are readily accessible for nearly any size of organization.  And while I disagree with Kotare’s dismissal of Clausewitz and the overarching aim of “breaking” an enemy’s will, his emphasis on the tangible nature of “strategy” as a target of collective effort is compelling.

In closing, Curtis Gale Weeks’s “Triangulation” of Clausewitz and Boyd offers a finite, n-space description of the ways by which an entity may seek to compel another.  His taxonomy, with three principal environments (rationality, probability and rage), three primary target sets (governance, military and population) and three categories of conflict (attrition, maneuver and moral) elicit 27 strategic permutations.  Perhaps rather than debating the merits of the individual yardsticks by which we measure any one of these metrics, we should rather be examining which of these permutations pose the greatest risk to our own strategies — and guarding against them.