House of War

The Generational Theory of Warfare states that the ways in which a society wages war reflects its particular social structure, politics, governing ideologies and morals, institutional structure, economic base and level of technological development. In short, the way a society wages war reflects what that society is an individual entity and how it is constituted. Hence, a nomadic tribal society will wage war differently to an industrialised socialist society, which will wage war differently to an information-age capitalist society. Moreover, as humans have experienced rapid change in the last few hundred years, what we are describing as the modern era, war has evolved in response.

In 1989, William Lind and a group of four marines used this realisation to develop a conceptual framework for understanding warfare in the modern era in their paper, The Changing Face of War: into the Fourth Generation. The Generational Theory of Warfare divided modern war into four distinct phases or “generations”, beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, and continuing to the present day. Lind describes these generational shifts as “watersheds in which change has been dialectically qualitative.” Although we might add as a caveat, elements of the forthcoming generations are present in the old.

After the Peace of Westphalia, war was monopolised by the state. Prior to the treaty, war was waged by numerous different actors: tribes, clans, families, gangs, mercenaries, city states, businesses, ethnicities and religions. War was not fought simply between two sets of professional soldiers. War was many sided and chaotic. Assassination, ambush and bribery featured as often as open battle.

1GW – First Generation Warfare: the rise of the state

According to Lind, “first generation warfare reflects tactics of the era of the smoothbore musket, the tactics of the line and column.” 1GW describes the sort of wars that typified the Napoleonic era, such as the Battle of Waterloo.

This kind of war developed as not only the result of tactical and technological breakthroughs, the columns and the smoothbore muskets, but also as the result of the political, economic, social, infrastructural and technological changes, which enabled them and which they represent. Thus 1GW required the rising power and resources of the nation-state, major economic advances necessary to field and sustain large armies, increased transport networks to move them, the emergence of nationalism which mobilised large populations ready to fight and die for the state, and the creation of the smoothbore musket which allowed the direct fire tactics of the Napoleonic wars. Importantly, 1GW inaugurated the military culture of order, the top-down hierarchy, love of rules and rank and all of the associated marching, drilling and saluting, much of which is still with us today.

2GW – Second Generation Warfare: wars of attrition

Lind states that “second generation warfare was a response to the rifled musket, breechloaders, barbed wire, the machine gun and indirect firepower.” Tactics were “essentially linear”, with defence in huge lines of trenches and attacks in small, usually fatal, rushes at the enemy positions. 2GW relied on massive amounts of indirect firepower, with artillery replacing infantry as the main weapon of battle, and as such gave defence the ascendancy. The Great War is the paradigmatic example of 2GW.

WWI in particular, and 2GW more generally, also required massive shifts in the social, political, economic, infrastructural and technological fields of the participating nations. Industrialisation greatly increased citizen wealth and thus the coffers of the state. It also greatly increased the industrial output to the level necessary to produce the huge quantities of shells and artillery spent on the front. The sheer scale of the Great War required the participant’s economies to expand enormously. The development of extensive rail and telegraph networks enabled the movement and coordination of these larger armies. Machine guns, rapid-fire artillery and barbed wire gave 2GW its tactical shape, and fervent nationalism gave it a large supply of men for the campaigns.

3GW – Third Generation Warfare: manoeuvre and mechanisation

The second generation responded to industrialisation, realising its potential in battlefield firepower. 3GW also responded to new developments in industrialisation, “however the driving force was primarily ideas” (Lind). The German army, realising it could not compete with the Allies at 2GW due to its weaker economic position, developed a new form of war to compensate for the relative disadvantage: manoeuvre warfare. 3GW employs non-linear tactics and mission dependent combined arms teams, seeking to collapse the enemy lines at key stress points, then pouring through to attack vital organisational positions (like HQ or communication bases), or trying to roll back the enemy’s flanks or collapse him from the rear. Unit leaders are given flexible mission orders and a high degree of autonomy. The advent of 3GW gave the military ascendancy to attack. Furthermore, the German military actually actively explored these possibilities in the interwar period, as well as studying the reasons for their failure in WWI, even as the French and British sat secure and apathetic in deluded self-confident belief that their 2GW militaries would be enough. The Germans sought out 3GW; when they met technologically and economically more advanced France in battle in 1940, they defeated its 2GW army in six weeks.

Important changes in society enabled the blitzkrieg. Germany ended WWI feeling betrayed by its leadership, rather than exhausted by the slaughter as the Allied Powers were. This gave the Germans the will to seek out and develop tactical and operational solutions to their asymmetry. The advances made in “aviation, armour, motor transport, artillery and communications… [were] essential to the birth of the blitzkrieg” (Hammes). Mechanised and armoured divisions could strike with lightening speed and react fluidly to changing battlefield situations. The Allies had access to the same technology, but lacked the requisite political will to develop it into the next generation of military forces. They were outflanked by German thought.

4GW – Fourth Generation Warfare: globalisation and social upheaval

A Panoply of Information

Globalisation has brought with it a major economic shift: the most successful societies are no longer those that produce the most goods, but those with the best access to knowledge and information. Information is diffuse throughout the whole system. It is shared through open-ended networks, access to which is mostly democratic. It moves easily across the globe. Modern communications and transport systems have flattened the world. People are connected more closely now than ever before. Our differences remain, but the distances between us have collapsed. Relative disadvantage is everywhere more visible.

A Panoply of Actors

The sovereign nation-state is no longer the “most important and most characteristic of modern institutions” (van Creveld). Today it must compete for space with a proliferation of different political entities. These are international organisations, like the UN and the WTO, and regional organisations like the EU and NAFTA. They are the multitude of new states created by the break up of the old colonial empires, all at different stages of development. They are trans-national organisations like NGOs, single-issue campaigns and terror networks like al Qaeda. They are the sub-national, the nations without states, such as the Kurds. And they are the all powerful global financial institutions, the traders of stocks, bonds and currency, the multi-national corporations and the large stock exchanges.

A Panoply of War

The collapse in the power and legitimacy of the state and the globalisation of information has shaped the international polity of humanity. Its structure is evolving from state dominated arborescence into a vast rhizome of interrelating institutions, organisations, networks, power centres, campaigns, tribal bands, hubs, communities; all or any can become involved in 4GW, alone or in concert, as participants or the battlefield. War has become amorphous, pervasive. In Iraq, for instance, Coalition forces face an array of different enemies, drawn from a variety of backgrounds (tribal, cultural and political), who fight for a host of different reasons. Between each other, there is much, even violent, disagreement, yet they fight the same foe: the state. And the state has serious problems. Because of their multitude and diffusion, the Iraqi state (including the Coalition) has found it difficult to locate the centre of gravity of the anti-state forces. It can find no one at whom it can aim its guns. It struggles even to decide who it is fighting. For the same reason, the state has no one with whom it can meet, negotiate, and sue for peace.

The battlefield dispersion, which characterises 3GW, increases in 4GW so that it includes an enemy’s culture as well as his country. The 4GW foe focuses attacks on important strategic centres rather than wasting them in direct conflict with an un-defeatable military machine. Targets are not only military, but also civilian: these might include vital infrastructure or the political support for a government, for example. The war is non-linear and the front is constantly shifting, so that it is barely discernable. Modern information networks encourage this; a terrorist might make a bomb out of whatever can be sourced locally using information distributed over the internet and stored on a laptop hard drive. Groups can remain in close contact with superiors, comrades and allies despite what once were prohibitive distances, allowing operations to be coordinated on multiple levels simultaneously, in different theatres across the globe.

4GW uses moral conflict to defeat the enemy. Strategically, it seeks to collapse the political will to fight by destroying “the moral bonds that [allow] the organic whole to exist – cohesion” (Robb). The fourth generation reverses Clausewitz’s famous axiom: politics as the continuation of war by other means. Operationally, it uses terror, spread through the international media channels, to threaten security. It finds the fault lines and fissures of social tension and exploits them, dividing its enemy. It creates economic uncertainty and stress. Tactically, operations are ad hoc and innovative. Terror cells are the ultimate combined arms teams, using whatever comes to hand to create as much chaos as possible deep within enemy territory. In contradistinction to our own rigidly hierarchical and ordered militaries, 4GW forces are highly flexible, decentralised organisations that spread decision making throughout the whole.

The variety of different hostile groups empowered by the decline of the state can and do wage war for their own particular reasons. Often these reasons remain obscure and beyond reach. Different factions come together for a common cause, to fight a common foe. John Robb describes them as “communities of violence”. War has become open-ended once more: any actors or groups join up and leave as they see fit, a return to the conditions that preceded the rise of the state in 1648. The 4GW enemy is a shifting patchwork of alliances and networks, kinship bonds and violent internal quarrels. They fight for their own causes, but all swim in the same ocean: the murky waters of state crisis and failure.

* * * * *

Necessarily, where two armies of different generations meet, the later generation has the advantage over the earlier, because the later makes better use of all available resources and contemporary political and economic realities. It is this fact that allows much smaller 4GW forces to defeat nominally superior militaries. Much of what occurs in the fourth generation is not new, stretching back as it does to Mao’s “people’s war”, classic Arabian light infantry tactics, and war in the years which preceded the era of state dominated conflict. However, the social changes that enabled 4GW are new. In an age where the state has less and less relevance and sovereignty, globalisation has created a different kind of war in its own image. Western governments and militaries have yet to realign themselves to this shift. They continue to fight yesterday’s wars, even as the future burns all around us. If the impact of globalisation is to be managed without causing systemic failure, we will have to change.

Edit: Bibliography

Hammes, 2004, The Sling and the Stone.

Lind, Nightengale, Schmitt, Sutton, Wilson, 1989, The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.

Van Creveld, 1996, The Fate of the State.