Fourth generation warfare

By Harold A. Gould & Franklin C. Spinney

WHAT HAS been called `fourth generation warfare' has now come of age. The toppling of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon using hijacked jetliners, and what may have been a failed attack on the White House, proves that henceforth there is no place to hide, when the attackers are ideological fanatics willing to conduct suicide missions in the name of their appointed cause.

These facts bring the changing nature of war right into the living room. By declaring war on the Al-Qaeda network of terror - a non- state globalisation phenomenon - America and the nation- state system formally recognised they were in a new era. The modern nation-state system was established in 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the wars of religion known as the 30 Years War and granted the state a monopoly on the use of organised violence. Since Westphalia, three generations of war evolved out of the violent clashes of nations: (1) classical nation-state war culminating in the Napoleonic Wars, (2) the industrial wars of attrition (the American Civil War through World War I), and (3) manoeuvre warfare (based on infiltration tactics, blitzkreig, and decision cycles) which emerged after World War I.

Fourth generation warfare changes everything. It pits nations against non-national organisations and networks that include not only fundamentalist extremists but ethnic groups, mafias, and narco-traffickers as well. Its evolutionary roots may lie in guerrilla warfare, the Leninist theory of insurrection, and old- fashioned terrorism, but it is rendered more pervasive and effective by the technologies, mobilities and miniaturised instrumentalities spawned by the age of computers and mass communication.

It allows the politically weak to circumvent the capacity of the state to protect itself through the use of conventional military means. In the words of Dr. Chester Richards, a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel, ``Roughly speaking, fourth generation warfare includes all forms of conflict where the other guy refuses to stand up and fight fair.'' Put simply, ``The distinction between war and peace (is) blurred to the vanishing point''. No longer are there ``definable battlefields or fronts''. Indeed, ``the distinction between `civilian' and `military''' ceases to exist. India has been the object of this evolving scenario of amorphous violence for more than a decade. Now the United States' turn has come.

New and very unpleasant strategies will need to be, indeed are already being, deployed to deal with a world in which there are no longer any safe havens no matter how innocent the individual or how powerful the state. The ubiquity and ambiguity of fourth generation warfare will require dramatic changes in military capabilities (training, doctrine, and weapons) as well as in how established states think about national security. States already confronted with fourth generation warfare illustrate the implications of this challenge. No matter how many search and destroy missions are initiated against ``terrorist'' sites. No matter how many terrorist operatives are targeted for assassination, terrorist planners and their weapon of choice, suicide-bombers, ceaselessly emerge from the anonymity of the crowd, supported both overtly and surreptitiously by rogue regimes led by kindred political monsters, to reap their vengeance and havoc upon innocent civilians in coffee houses, shopping centres, bus stops, public buildings, indeed any and all symbols of established society.

Fourth generation warfare is a self-organising art form that, in a certain sense, enables the self-proclaimed victims of oppression to transform their alleged oppressors into victims. As we have just seen, this emergent breed of warriors feeds off the assets of their designated target. The Trade Center/Pentagon conspirators lived among their intended victims, spent months matriculating at American pilot-training facilities, driving American rental cars and eating American pizzas in preparation for their unspeakable crimes. The process of successfully infiltrating with subtlety and stealth their targeted society and inflicting terrible carnage on it, heroised the perpetrators in the eyes of their ``constituents''. It played well in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Baghdad!

The challenge now confronting America, India and the world of nation-states is how to deal with this fundamental alteration in the rules of war. What they do will test their mettle as never before in history. Ways will have to be found to decisively subdue a remorseless foe who believes that unlimited violence, unencumbered by pity and compassion as we understand it, is justified in the name of religiously-conceptualised rage. This must be accomplished without civilised society losing its soul in the process.

In tactical terms, this means coordinating intelligence on a global scale. It means rapier thrusts against fourth generation warfare bases and cells, slicing up the networks linking the cells, and taking out the fanatics who supply the brains and the resources to conduct this kind of indiscriminate warfare. Because the nation-state no longer holds a monopoly on destructive force, a most important change in how fourth generation warfare is confronted is to henceforth ordain that the sanctuary of ``national sovereignty'' is no longer sacrosanct, can no longer be honoured when employed as a facade for sheltering, endorsing and provisioning non-national fourth generation warfare assets and formations.

As in any conflict, the military task must be to disarm the enemy and neutralise his offensive capability, employing the weapons and tactics appropriate for the task.

However, the strategic conundrum is that blind retaliatory force will breed more suicide-bombers; it will arm the enemy. A balance must be struck between the short-term need to defeat the enemy on the battlefield and the long-term need to dry up his sources of support. This will require more than the cultivation of alliances and the active engagement of one's own population in the struggle.

To accomplish the latter, America and the West must work to reduce the sources of the anti-American, anti-Western rage still sweeping the post-colonial world. It will require policies designed to alleviate the poverty, the lingering remnants of colonialism, and the violations of human rights which sustain the ranks of the miserable, the alienated, and the downtrodden of this world.

They are the human raw material from which fourth generation warfare recruits its warriors. It is they for whom mortal life is so cheap that suicide on behalf of the cause is a triumph instead of a tragedy. Only when social conditions are attained which make life more worth living for than dying for will fourth generation warfare fade into the mists of history.

(The writers are, respectively, Visiting Scholar of South Asian Studies, Center for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia; and a civilian in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. The views expressed above do not represent those of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.)

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