Explosions and Shootout in Paris

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

"The Fourth Generation is not defined as Tom Hammas defines it, insurgency, which is just a buzzword for something that's old. What defines the Fourth Generation is the state's loss of the monopoly on war it established at Westphalia. That is by far the biggest change in war since 1648. As Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian puts it, "what changes is not how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for." And those are larger changes than the changes in how war is fought.
In a Fourth Generation war, the U.S. praises itself for the new counterinsurgency manual, which is just a rehash from Vietnam. If it's a rehash of Vietnam, with whom do we sit down with in Paris to make peace? Who can deliver it? When you have this endless kaleidescope of opponents fighting for different goals and different kinds of goals, how do you end it?

Another key aspect is that we move from a world of states at war to a world of cultures at war. And other cultures do not fight the way we do. I'm sure most, if not all of you know that most Arab armies are crap. But when Arabs fight, in accordance with their own traditions, which is irregular light cavalry warfare, they've proven to be quite good at it. We call it terrorism. The passing way of war always calls the arriving way of war terrorism. To the knights on horseback, musketeers were terrorists. There were actually rules ordering their eyes to be put out if they were captured.

Other cultures don't fight the way we do. We fight like a football game. Everybody lines up, they blow the whistle, and go wham into one another. The phalanx. The joust. Other cultures don't do that. Other cultures fight indirectly. We all celebrate the Athenian victories over the Persians at Marathon and Salamis. But the Persians ended up beating the Athenians. How did they do it? They provided Sparta with money and a fleet. There are other ways to fight and most other cultures prefer indirect ways of war.

We don't get it, because we say if it's not a joust, it's not war. Sorry, if it changes the outcome on the ground, it's war, regardless of whether it is by playing King of the Hill or not. Yes, we can play King of the Hill better than anyone else. We can be the cock of the dung hill on any dung hill on Earth if we want to. But there is more to war than that. John Boyd used to say, "when I was a young officer they taught me that if you have land superiority and air superiority and sea superiority, you win. Well, in Vietnam, we had land superiority and air superiority and sea superiority, but we lost. So there's obviously something more to it." Other cultures' ways of war play over a much broader spectrum and we are having real trouble coming to grips with that.

All over the world, state militaries are having enormous trouble coming to grips with non-state opponents. Because what were you designed to fight? What are you equipped to fight, what are you trained to fight, what do you want to fight? Somebody like yourself, with similar uniforms and tanks and planes. That's our game. The problem is that game has become a joust. Which is to say, entertainment, because real war has gone in a very different direction."

The Four Generations of Modern War by William S. Lind Published by Castalia House Kouvola, Finland www.castaliahouse.com

Get the book on kindle for a few bucks.

[Gusington]

Thanks for the above, I'm going to check it out.

[Centurion40]

But there is more to war than that. John Boyd used to say, "when I was a young officer they taught me that if you have land superiority and air superiority and sea superiority, you win. Well, in Vietnam, we had land superiority and air superiority and sea superiority, but we lost. So there's obviously something more to it." Other cultures' ways of war play over a much broader spectrum and we are having real trouble coming to grips with that.

For me, this is a crux of the issue.  We are not prepared or equipped to play their game.  IMHO, we should pull our forces out of the Middle East and let them sort out their own issues with each other.  But we should strongly support our friends there, even if they be bastards like Saddam.

[OJsDad]

Obama still doesn't get it.  Listening to him speak at the G20.  Doesn't believe the refugee issue related to the issue of terrorism.  He also has no will to commit US troops to the ground. 

[bayonetbrant]

Obama still doesn't get it.  Listening to him speak at the G20.  Doesn't believe the refugee issue related to the issue of terrorism.  He also has no will to commit US troops to the ground. 

We probably should've done this earlier, but let's shift discussions of the politics of fighting (or even acknowledging) terror and discussions of how to respond over to RPFW.  Thanks!

This is not a knock on OJsDad.  This should've been done for all of us before now :)

http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=15416

[JasonPratt]

I agree with some of Lind's positions so far as they were quoted (thanks, Biggs), but not with all of it.

First, I don't call terrorism "terrorism" because it's the new hotness in methodology and I'm stuck in the old combat paradigm. I call it terrorism because its purpose is to sow terror in civilian populations by attacking non-combatants. Nor do I think that's the new hotness in method; it's a new word for something that's old (like "insurgency"), although how they're going about it is a little new in terms of the technology for killing non-combatants being more efficient than from the 19th century backward. Lind's comparison to musketeers is almost completely inapt. I suppose I should also add that what we're calling "terrorism" is certainly not irregular light cavalry skirmishing.  ::)

Second, the Viet Cong and especially the NVA were perfectly willing to fight a conventional war when they thought they could win it; they just had enough sense not to insist on a conventional war at some tactical and operational levels, sometimes. But even those times were meant, by the North itself, to be lulls and preparations for the conventional fighting. And even once we withdrew, leaving the ARVN to protect its own country, the NVA won their final victory with a conventional blitzkrieg push using the latest in conventional technology which their allies could supply.

To that I could add that ISIS itself hasn't won and held its gains by insurgency or terrorism. They got together an army or two or three, organized more-or-less properly, deployed more-or-less properly, and fought a conventional war against an opponent who wasn't really prepared to fight that way.

Lind's own position, so far as is stated in those paragraphs, runs quite counter to what he quoted from van Creveld: Lind doesn't go on to start talking about who is fighting and what is being fought for, but focuses immediately on how the war is being fought. (Except, as noted above, not really. ;) )


I do however agree that not only the how (sometimes) but the who and the why have been changing; and I agree that we could define it (I'm not sure I'd call it the Fourth Generation of Modern War but whatever) as "the state's loss of the monopoly on war", maybe from farther back than Westphalia, but concurrent with the modern transition of world governments into nation-states.

... ....... come to think of it, this may be my extent of substantial agreement with Lind so far as quoted. ;) It's like this guy has never even heard of the Cold War: yes, I'm PRETTY DAMN SURE that modern Western militaries are well aware that whatever changes the conditions on the ground is war, and that fighting indirectly (such as by paying proxies to fight) still counts as war.

[JasonPratt]

(Uh, I know BBCode has a way for admins and mods to move posts into a new thread elsewhere. Maybe that should / could be done here, for political / social commentary?)

[Sir Slash]

I love it. I've got a Canadian friend that's a big liberal. He couldn't stand the Conservatives being in power for 10 years. He was happy as hell the Liberals on he recent election and furious after the Paris attack and going on and on about the world needing to go to war to destroy ISIS. And now his new DM wants to try dialog an reasoning. Can't make this stuff-up.             

[bayonetbrant]

(Uh, I know BBCode has a way for admins and mods to move posts into a new thread elsewhere. Maybe that should / could be done here, for political / social commentary?)

just copy and paste it yourself :)

[panzerde]

I like a lot of what Lind has to say, but in this as well as his text on Maneuver Warfare he's guilty of cherry-picking to support his position. And while I think there is considerable validity to his points about Fourth Generation Warfare, particularly as it applied to Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan, I'm not sure it's as applicable to ISIS.


Let's start with the cherry-picking. Sure, NATO conventional forces are tools of direct war. But to look at the post-WWII activity of Western intelligence agencies and claim that the West doesn't engage in indirect war is a stretch. If the example Lind wants to use if the Persians funding the Spartans to defeat Athens in the Peloponnesian War, then certainly Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan is a direct parallel. And, like our funding of the Mujahideen versus the Soviets, the Persians experienced some nasty blowback: all their efforts accomplished was to clear the field for Alexander and to give the Macedonians an excuse for the phalanxes to put paid to any future Persian aspirations towards "indirect warfare." If that's Lind's example then we got off lightly in comparison, and I'd suggest that rather than proving his point it suggests that maybe the Persian approach wasn't so great after all.


Lind only wants to look at militaries, and fails to consider all of the non-military solutions. He's enamoured with indirection. He has some good points and planners would be well served to take heed of what he says, but let's look at the facts on the ground:


Al Qaeda is washed up. They haven't managed a significant operation in years now, their leadership is mostly dead, and all of their recruits are going to ISIS (more on that in a minute). They have no credibility left in the Moslem world, and that's because they lost their operational capability. Why? Because we hunted them down, cut off their sources of revenue, denied them any place to base out of, and every time they popped a head up, we blew it off with a Hellfire. I think if you look at operations against Al Qaeda over the course of the last fifteen years, they've been pretty damn effective. A big part of that success was indirect warfare, but a big part of it was the poor bloody infantry on the ground, too.


Despite many so-called experts decrying it at the time, the troop surge in Iraq pretty much shut the insurrection down. Yes, it takes a mix of shooting the people that need to be shot combined with Hearts & Minds activity, but the issue isn't that Western militaries can't cope with COIN and Lind's Fourth Generation Warfare. It's that you can't do it on the cheap, you need enough troops, and screw Donald Rumsfeld very much, thanks.


Subsequent failures in Iraq have been due to our foreign policy and strategic blunders in not actually building a regime that could survive, and not because our forces couldn't end the insurrection. If you prop up a new Shia regime and turn a deaf ear to the complaints of the Sunnis, and then pull all of your troops out (after having made sure that the former Baathist military leadership were always going to be considered criminals) guess what you're going to get? I suspect it looks a lot like a bunch of Baathist-led Sunnis playing radicals. Sound familiar? That doesn't have squat to do with Western military capability.


I could go on about the Arab Spring and how all of that was pretty clearly propped up by Western "indirect" efforts, but we can all see how well that's turned out.


Finally, let's get real about ISIS. Equating these guys to the "traditional" terrorist cells in the Middle East is just incorrect. ISIS is acting like a state. It wants to hold territory. It's minting coinage, passing laws, engaging in commerce (selling tons of oil on the sly), and in general, trying to be an actual country, not a terrorist cell. ISIS ceases to exist if it packs up and goes to hide in caves like Al Qaeda did. It has to have a presence on the ground. Yes, they are going to try and execute attacks like they just did in France, and Lind is right that those sorts of attacks are part of the repertoire of Arab fighters going way back - but those kinds of actions don't take and hold ground and oil fields, which ISIS has to have. ISIS is a state. Which makes it vulnerable to exactly the sort of military action Lind's book says doesn't work anymore. Take their territory, blockade oil sales, deprive them of means to make money, places to build bases, and access to recruits and ISIS is gone.


Which doesn't mean that some other group of Middle East zealots won't pop up and do some of the same crap. As long as Arab Muslim culture clings to the values it clings to, there's absolutely nothing we can do to stop that from happening. I agree with Lind that there is a war of cultures going on here. I don't buy that it's Muslim culture so much as I think it's the culture of the Middle East and Central Asia. Indonesia has more Muslims than anywhere else, and we don't see a ton of radicalism coming from there, for example. We're going to have to address the Arab cultural issue if we have a hope of ending this, and that's tough, because these people nurse grudges for freaking centuries. They make the Irish look like pikers. I mean, the Shite-Sunni conflict is the equivalent of having Catholics and Lutherans routinely killing each other over the Thirty Years War, except it goes back even further and the central issue wasn't of the magnitude of the TYW.


Ultimately, the ME is screwed. They heydays of easy oil money are over; the US and Russia produce more than enough to meet domestic needs here and in Europe, and Chinese demand is way down. Alternative energy sources are coming online. Iran is about to start selling serious amount of oil again. Unemployment throughout the region is about to spike like it never has before. Culturally, these people persist in practices that skew their demographics toward young males. Climate change is going to make the region uninhabitable or nearly so over the course of the next century. Combine all of that with radical interpretations of their religion and a culture that encourages beliefs that are completely orthogonal to ours, and there is NO WAY you aren't going to get more radicalization and terrorism. Toss Western support for Israel into the mix, and the fuse is lit.


This isn't an issue of Fourth Generation Warfare. We can beat any Middle Eastern radical movement any time we are willing to expend the blood and treasure to do so. Unfortunately, even if we were to leave these people completely alone from now on, and even if we care for their refugees, set up McDonalds' on every street corner, and subsidize their economies, they are going to keep doing this. Because culturally, they simply can not tolerate living alongside our culture. They entire point of what they are doing here is to try and force Western culture to change into their culture. That's why even "moderate" Middle Eastern Muslims express the attitude that while they may not approve of terrorism per se, they sympathize with the aims of these radical movements.


As I said to a friend the other day "Somebody needs the Reformation, and fast." The culture of the Middle East is out of the Middle Ages, it just uses modern technology. I doubt we can change it from the outside, or are at least unwilling to do what's necessary to change it. Instead we'd best get ready for this to be the normal state of affairs. Militarily and strategically I think that means building and maintaining a full set of capabilities that includes Lind's Fourth Generation Warfare but also a fair number of MBTs, fighters, bombers, and ships. Even if all we ever see from a post-ISIS ME are non-state actors, it sure looks to me like Russia and China have plenty of the conventional forces Lind thinks are useless today. It's plain that Russian at least isn't afraid to use them, either.

[OJsDad]

Obama still doesn't get it.  Listening to him speak at the G20.  Doesn't believe the refugee issue related to the issue of terrorism.  He also has no will to commit US troops to the ground. 

We probably should've done this earlier, but let's shift discussions of the politics of fighting (or even acknowledging) terror and discussions of how to respond over to RPFW.  Thanks!

This is not a knock on OJsDad.  This should've been done for all of us before now :)

http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=15416

Agree with the separate thread.

FYI, my comments were directed to the press conference Pres. Obama just had in Turkey.

[bayonetbrant]

FYI, my comments were directed to the press conference Pres. Obama just had in Turkey.

I figured that's what you were referring to, but just want to channel the discussion into a different area

[JasonPratt]

I'll copy-paste commentary to an RPFW thread soon, if someone doesn't beat me to it.

Back to news on the Paris situation: Associated Press is saying the (probable?) mastermind behind this was foiled twice recently in his plots, once by those Air Force tourists. (Am I remembering their service branch right? Slept since then. ;) )

A French official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said police had identified the suspected mastermind as Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national believed to operating in Syria. He is featured in a 2014 video apparently taken in Syria boasting of carrying a cargo of killed "infidels" in the back of his vehicle.

The official, who has direct knowledge of the police investigation but is not authorized to speak publicly about the probe, said Abaaoud also is suspected of overseeing two thwarted attacks earlier this year on a Paris church and a Paris-bound train. The latter attack was stopped by American passengers who restrained a gun-toting man before he could open fire.

The officials also said a sleeper cell in France met the attackers before their attack and helped them to plan it. They said 24 people were involved: 19 attackers and five who provided logistics and planning.

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/news/story/1001/20151116/9724


In slightly annoying news, someone thought it was a good idea to set off some fireworks during the memorial, causing a stampede. I'm going to guess alcohol was involved in that decision.  ::)

[BanzaiCat]

These asshats can't even get their precious little Caliphate going where they live. What makes them think this will be a worldwide thing? The Communists thought the same thing, and look where it got them.

[bayonetbrant]

The Communists thought the same thing, and look where it got them.

it got them a significant chunk of world real estate for a while there.
then human nature took over and the communist dream turned into any other strongman-based regime