FourthGenerationWar

ThoughtStorms Wiki

A historicist or evolutionary story of warfare :

It has three central characteristics:
The loss of the state’s monopoly on war and on the first loyalty of its citizens and the rise of non-state entities that command people’s primary loyalty and that wage war. These entities may be gangs, religions, races and ethnic groups within races, localities, tribes, business enterprises, ideologies—the variety is almost limitless;
A return to a world of cultures, not merely states, in conflict; and
The manifestation of both developments—the decline of the state and the rise of alternate, often cultural, primary loyalties—not only “over there,” but in America itself.
Fourth Generation war is asymmetrical, but it is asymmetrical on a much broader scale than simply the pitting of a conventional army against guerillas. The larger asymmetry is political. Fourth Generation was pits a state, or alliance of states, against a shifting mass of opponents of wildly varying motives and goals. Among the problems that presents is that the state has no one to talk to about making peace. Who does Mr. Kissinger sit down with in Paris this time?
Nor does Fourth Generation war have as its objective the mind of the leader on the other side. Rather, what it does is pull its enemy apart on the moral level, fracturing his society. We see that clearly today in Israel, where the fractures may soon reach the point where the political process cannot bridge them.

– http://d-n-i.net/lind/lind923_05.htm

In the BlitzKrieg, the basis of the operational art shifted from place (as in Liddell-Hart's indirect approach) to time. This shift was explicitly recognized only recently in the work of retired Air Force Col John Boyd and his "OODA (observation- orientation- decision- action) theory." *

(Also TheSwingBetweenTimeAndSpace)

Explicitly understood by AlQaeda? : http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=middleeast&ID=SP34402

New equilibrium : http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2005/09/warsnewequili.html

What is resilience :http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2006/05/on-moral-and-psychological-resilience.html

Counter

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/newsletter/opeds/2005feb.pdf

Countervailing

Third Gen. armies deteriourate into second gen. ones. http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind831_06.htm

: For reasons basically similar to the argument put forward in IvanIllich's ToolsForConviviality

Compare :

FifthGenerationWar

FourthGenerationPolitics