House of War

Bill Roggio has an timely and in-depth analysis of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency via the Ramazan Corps, Qods Force’s operational command in Iraq. The Ramazan Corps provides arms, advice and basic training, distributed along a series of “ratlines” that run into the country from Iran’s western border.

Inside Iran, Qods Force manufactures and distributes weapons, provides training for Iraqi recruits, then facilitates the movement of weapons and fighters inside Iraq. Iraqi recruits, largely radicalized Shia from Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, are sent to Iran for what one US military officer described as “basic jihadi training.” The recruits receive several weeks of training with small arms and, depending on the units assigned, mortars and the use of explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs.

American commanders also dispute reports that Iran has reduced its involvement in Iraq, and that it has helped to curb the violence:

“I don’t know what this Iranian pledge is, but the number of munitions has increased,” Lynch said on November 11. “It could be that we are finding them more. But it is still troublesome. I have no idea when these EFP munitions came … before or after the pledge. I don’t know.”

Reading the recent exchange between Noah Shactman and Tom Barnett, it seems to me that both are right in some sense, or at least, both have useful contributions to make.

Shactman’s thesis (published in WIRED) is only partially explained by its title: How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic. In the article he describes how the focus of the American military, as an institution, on fighting large, WWII-scale battles against peer (or almost peer) opposition armed forces, occluded them and left them unable to recognise or divine the looming mess of post-conflict Iraq urban insurrection.

Except, that’s not quite what he says. It’s probably what he should have said, but as Tom Barnett points out, Shactman’s article, in effect, excuses the US Administration for any mistakes made or lack of foresight, and instead blames it all on… Arthur Cebrowski, John Garstka and the theory of Network Centric Warfare as they developed it.

However, although he initially proposes a strangely simplified dichotomy (further reduced by me to 4GW vs. NCW), as the piece progresses the two supposedly opposing sides don’t seem quite so exclusive. For instance, though Shactman is unimpressed by the Fourth Division’s ultra-modern telecommunications and networked tracking systems, the actual users appear to feel differently. “No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily. “It increases the unit’s combat power, no question,” Prior says.” The potential of the NCW doctrine is ignored, even as its successes are recounted: “When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed.” Garstka even tells him directly that “you have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.” But Shactman either can’t see the obvious positive uses for the networked, advanced-tech, quantitative analysis approach which emerge from his writing or, perhaps more probably, doesn’t want to because it contradicts his idea.

It’s almost funny when Shactman interviews Petraeus towards the article’s end. “I’m expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare,” he writes. “Instead, he sings me a love song.”

Zenpundit sums it up well:

The crux of the problem with Shachtman’s article is that his opener gives the impression that the botching of the occupation in Iraq should be laid at the door of two men who articulated strategic ideas with impressive intellectual celerity and subtlety, one of whom is no longer able to defend himself.

Indeed, Shactman would do better to look at institutions rather than an idea because,

whenever a theory is accepted by a large and powerful bureaucratic organization- like, say, the Pentagon - it collides with reality.

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.

GlobalTerrorAlert have posted the translation of an interview with a foreign jihadist, fighting for al Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq”. The interview was originally streamed live via a radical Arabic chatroom on Paltalk and features Abu Adam al-Maqdisi, a Palestinian national.

Al-Maqdisi discusses the global Salafi jihad, local operations and of particular interest to 4GW and 5GW conoisseurs, the propaganda machine of the ISI, describing “brothers” who disseminate Islamist ideology on CDs and video tapes, copying “around 500 - 600 per day”. He also states that his comrades stay in contact with each other and with the larger struggle via internent chatrooms. The contrast between the ISI’s exploitation of New Media and the United States Armed Forces’ self-harming censorship of its own troops could not be more striking. (Via Counterterrorism Blog)

Democracies don’t like war. They are squeamish about casualties and in the modern world, with its globalised news organisations, the internet and near instantaneous communication, when they go to war they see a lot of casualties. Jihadists understand this and have devised their assault accordingly. Terrorists’ media orientated attacks strike at the heart of the Western “centre of gravity”, i.e. its political will and motivation. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to protect this centre of gravity because of the inherent openness of Western society. And because of the inherent closed-ness of Islamic society (lack of a free press, little history of self-criticism, parallel cousin marriage, etc), because non-state or sub-state actors (Hamas, Hezbollah, Quds, etc) are being protected but not controlled by sovereign nation states and because of the proliferation of international terror networks (al Qaeda et al), clandestine by nature, it has also proved impossible for the West to locate and strike the terrorists’ centre of gravity. Bad news for the free world.

Terrorist tactics have evolved with the emergent “cyber-“ or “network-“ paradigm (globalised information channels and associated technologies, so radicalised youth in Beeston can be watching jihadist footage of IED attacks on American soldiers the very next day) and in reaction to the extreme discrepancy between their own and Western (especially US) forces. In short, jihadist terrorism is a response to the western way of war, utilising, ad hoc but with much success, western technologies. Whilst obviously medieval in their political and religious philosophies (and utterly barbaric on the battlefield: mass slaughter of civilians, revenge rapes and so on way past the point of nausea), jihadist terrorism nevertheless represents the utmost in modernity in terms of warfare.

There are numerous prescient examples of the superiority of the jihadist netwar or fourth generational warfare (4GW) approach (Iraq obviously), but perhaps the most relevant is the recent Israeli offensive in Lebanon. Hezbollah will never succeed in defeating Israel in open battle, but using 4GW methods and tactics managed to repulse Israel, inflicting heavy casualties and winning important military victories, to further damage Israel’s reputation on the international stage, to improve their own image on the Arab street, and to emerge in a stronger position than before as the most powerful terrorist organisation in the world.

Clausewitz noted that defensive war is easier than attack, and surely neither Hamas nor Hezbollah will be rolling the tanks through the streets of Jerusalem. However, success in open battle is not necessary (or feasible) at this stage. What we are witnessing is engineered shifts in the balance of power. Israeli Defence Force doctrine states that one of the goals of the IDF is to project the image of overwhelming force in order to discourage further attacks by Israel’s many enemies. But Hezbollah have made the IDF look weak: defeatable. That is an important victory in itself, for jihadism in general and not just for Hezbollah in particular.

Hezbollah utilised highly committed soldiers, unafraid of causing mass civilian casualties (on any side), created a network of short range artillery and fighters dispersed and concealed across the whole of mountainous southern Lebanon, and of course probably most importantly, through its media wing, al Manar, was adept at using mass media and modern communications networks to manipulate public opinion both in the West and the Middle East. The group was able to fire its automated rockets at large civilian targets in Israel, shutting down cities as their inhabitants hid from the random attacks in bomb shelters, whilst hiding its firepower near civilian targets in Lebanon. They skilfully pounced on any civilian casualties of Israel’s response, and used the furore to erode public support for Israel and to generate an international movement to halt the Israeli offensive. That is to say, Hezbollah mobilised an international pro-jihadist network, a fifth column dedicated to attacking Israel’s centre of gravity, its political will. Hezbollah successfully dilated the battlefield and won a defensive fourth generation war.

War continues to evolve, and the diverse dispersal of jihadist centres and networks, its cells and its media, forms a vast architecture: a rhizomatic web dedicated to fighting this new, future war. Hezbollah is but one part of this structure and its success in the Lebanese theatre last summer provides an important model of how a jihadist group, relatively well funded, armed and lead, can defeat a nominally much superior modern western military machine. And a victory for jihadism anywhere is a victory for jihadism everywhere in the ongoing cultural war, helping to form the ongoing narrative of jihad. In order to win the War on Terror the political will to do so must be generated and protected; oppositional narratives must be formed and inscribed upon the cultural landscape. The West must locate and reach out to the terrorists’ own centre of gravity: public opinion in the Middle East and in the wider Muslim Diaspora. The West needs its own fifth column, and its own fourth generational warriors capable of fighting the future war.

As it stands, no terrorist group, no state or non-state actor, could fight and win a conventional war with the West. However, according to standard insurgency principles (by now: see Mao for the origins of this theory), and looking at jihad as the “long war”, we are at Phase I of its attack on the West: the Strategic Defensive. Jihadism will continue to build strength politically and militarily, wage asymmetrical 4GW, attack the political will to confront it, and try to shift the balance of power until it is strong enough to engage the West in conventional open battle.

******

The future is armed to the teeth and is highly motivated, it is dispersed across an ever wider landscape, and it is not waiting for us to arrive: it has begun its relentless assault regardless, chanting the ancient slogans of religious bigotry and blood for a vengeful god. Unless we step into it and learn to fight the future war more effectively than our enemies, we have already lost. For just as he who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the future, also controls the past.