On the Draft Manual for 4GW (2): Eliminating the Blob

by | Apr 18, 2007


For Lind et al (writing in their draft field manual), 4th generation warfare is about fighting an idea rather than fighting for territory (in Afghanistan, the Soviets failed because they ‘could not operationalize a conflict where the enemy’s strategic center of gravity was God’).

Fight an idea with conventional weapons and you often fail. ‘Every physical victory,’ Lind says, ‘may move you closer to moral defeat.’ So how do you win when strength itself can be an Achilles heal?

Lind draws the idea of a ‘moral defeat’ comes from John Boyd, the fighter pilot and godfather of contemporary military theory. For Boyd, third generation or manoeuvre warfare (think WW2 blitzkrieg) is all about using speed, ambiguity and innovation to confuse, disorient and then break the enemy.

The Germans learned to fight this way during the First World War, where – for all their strategic and operational failings – they were masters of tactical innovation. According to Bruce Gudmundsson’s account of the birth of stormtrooper tactics, the German army was much more resilient in the face of battlefield chaos than its enemies, and was more adaptable when confronted by unfamiliar problems.

This led to a revolution in firepower (much more diverse – units used any tool that would get the job done), movement (distributed rather than centrally coordinated) and leadership:

“It was no longer sufficient for the small unit leader to be the bravest member of the battleline. Lieutenants and NCOs became key decision makers upon whose shoulders rested complete responsibility for the outcome of one of the thousands of little combats into which the battle had disintegrated.”

4GW takes these lessons and further dematerializes them. If 2G or attrition warfare is Fordist manufacturing, then 3G is the Toyota manufacturing system (“Good Thinking Means Good Product”). 4GW strips the ‘product’ out, leaving ‘good thinking’ to stand alone. This is warfighting in the knowledge economy.

For Boyd, winning involves a game of ‘connection and isolation’. Winners aggressively expand their identity and spread their memes. They evolve fast when threatened. Losers are stranded in an ever-shrinking world. They cannot cope with change. Their whither. Go out of fashion.

A systemic attack is essential. One must:

“Penetrate adversary’s moral-mental-physical being to dissolve his moral fiber, disorient his mental images, disrupt his operations, and overload his system, as well as subvert, shatter, seize, or otherwise subdue those moral-mental-physical bastions, connections, or activities that he depends upon, in order to destroy internal harmony, produce paralysis, and collapse adversary’s will to resist.

All this leads us to the problem at the heart of Lind’s manual. How does one graft a fluid, weightless, and all-encompassing strategy onto state institutions that are defined by their physicality and rigidity?

Lind’s answer is not a totally convincing one. He takes the traditional military hierarchy of strategic, operational and tactical and attempts to marry it to Boyd’s moral-mental-physical formulation. The result is Fourth Generation Warfare conceived as ‘a blob’:

The blob may shift, so slowly as to be imperceptible or with stunning speed, into as many different shapes as can be imagined. Each shift represents changes on both the strategic/operational/physical axes. Again, the variety of shapes illustrates the complexities of relationships among levels, along with potential disharmonies that can be exploited…All actions must be considered with great care and from a variety of perspectives lest they have unintended consequences on other (and possibly) higher levels.

Lind’s blob’ is reminiscent of the multiplying epicycles that astronomers grafted onto Ptolemaic astronomy as they struggled to keep it inline with perceived reality. The result was increasingly complex and ugly.

Kepler, of course, eliminated the epicycle with his simpler and more elegant theory. The blob is nothing if not inelegant. So how do we eliminate the blob?

[Part 1 here. To be continued]

Author

  • David Steven is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation and at New York University, where he founded the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver the SDG targets for preventing all forms of violence, strengthening governance, and promoting justice and inclusion. He was lead author for the ministerial Task Force on Justice for All and senior external adviser for the UN-World Bank flagship study on prevention, Pathways for Peace. He is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). In 2001, he helped develop and launch the UK’s network of climate diplomats. David lives in and works from Pisa, Italy.


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