Spoetnik
14-01-05, 13:39
4GW and the Riddles of Culture
by Werther*
December 30, 2004
* Werther is the pen name of a defense analyst based in Northern Virginia .
D-N-I.net's recently posted briefing on Iraq as a case study of Fourth Generation Warfare, or 4GW [1] should be mandatory reading for the men who rule the United States. It is long past time: the twenty-one months that have elapsed between the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the present quagmire nearly equal the period between the landing on Tarawa and the surrender at Tokyo Bay — or Gettysburg and Appomattox.
Those comparisons raise a significant issue: how is it that in the past, an American nation much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched opponents, could prevail against its enemies more quickly than a state with an $11-trillion GDP and a defense budget approaching $500 billion (bear in mind, the Bush Administration is preparing a budget supplemental of about $80 billion for the current fiscal year) against 10-20,000 insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP less than the turnover of a large corporation?
4GW theory gives us a partial answer. Insurgency warriors try to avoid, rather than seek, decisive battles. The more prolonged the war, the more the occupiers become confused and exhausted, and the more they employ counterproductive tactics. There is no Pickett's Charge to decide the issue one way or another. These precepts, however, should be present in popular insurgencies dating from the remote abysm of time. Instead, they raise questions:
*
Why are they common only after the Second World War — Algeria, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Chiapas, Colombia, and now, most spectacularly, in those sections of the Arab heartland occupied by Israel and the United States?
*
Why does 4GW fit the tenor of the times, while the conventional conflicts the U.S. military trains for and the U.S. taxpayer pays for increasingly emit a whiff of the antique?
Popular insurgencies and guerrilla campaigns containing aspects of 4GW are of course a feature of all recorded history: from the Roman campaign in Spain though Francis Marion in the American War of Independence to the Moro insurgency during the Theodore Roosevelt administration. It is our purpose here to examine why an episodic and secondary phenomenon of warfare has become the dominant means of armed conflict only in the present age.
But be forewarned: there are more questions than answers.
T.E. Lawrence: Precursor to 4GW or Desert Sideshow?
Military writers cite the World War I exploits of Colonel T.E. Lawrence as a model for current 4GW operations, but this example requires qualification. His Bedouin allies’ tactics against the Turks were militarily effective and offer a case book for later insurgencies, particularly in the Arab Middle East. But they were hardly the largest headache the Ottoman Turks faced: at most, the Revolt in the Desert was an adjunct to the British Empire's conventional military campaigns staged along three axes: the Dardanelles, the Sinai, and Mesopotamia. At the same time, the Turks were fighting a large-scale conventional campaign against Russia in the Caucasus.
In other theaters of that conflict, insurgency against occupation was barely detectable: Belgium, Northern France, Poland and Russia, even the Balkans (where Serbian national resistance consisted of successfully withdrawing its army, the king included, to Corfu). One might make a partial exception of Ireland, but the fact remains that the Easter Rebellion was quickly crushed and remained crushed for the duration of the war, and far more Irish served loyally (and suicidally) in British colors than for the Republican cause.
Amid four years of unprecedented violence, perhaps the most successful act of national resistance of World War I was the studied refusal of the various minorities of the Habsburg Empire to be obedient and self-sacrificial soldiers. This weakening of the Central Powers’ military resources presented Germany with a strategic dilemma — it could not be sufficiently strong on both fronts simultaneously so as to achieve decisive victory — that was fatal. The Good Soldier Schweik syndrome, however, was a radically different dynamic than what the United States faces in Iraq, the Israelis in Palestine, or the Russians in Chechnya.
The Good War and the Myth of the Resistance
At first sight, World War II offers a more hopeful case study for 4GW-style armed resistance against military occupation. "Now set Europe ablaze!" was Winston Churchill's 1940 directive to the Special Operations Executive, his newly minted organization designed to catalyze, supply, and direct popular armed resistance to German occupation of the European continent. Likewise, the exploits of its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services, and the rapid postwar preferment of such alumni as William Casey and William Colby suggest the importance of World War II as a seed bed for violent insurgency against unpopular military occupiers.
There is some truth in this edifying tale, perhaps; but not much. An interesting refutation of the myth of the resistance is found in John Keegan's book The Second World War (1989). Mr. Keegan has subsequently written some flawed analyses of both the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the U.S. invasion of Iraq (seeing in both cases the false dawn of a new era of warfare dominated by air power and/or highly technological forces patterned on current U.S. doctrine); his opinions on temporally more distant events, whereby the ruminative process winnows out political fads, is sounder.
His emphatic conclusion is that the resistance was never more than the barest pinprick inconveniencing the German occupation; even in Yugoslavia, where conditions were most favorable to local insurgents, the Axis was never in danger of losing what it valued: its lines of communication to the Aegean and flank protection for the Ploesti oil fields and its operations in Southern Russia. Germany lost its grip on Yugoslavia only after conventional military disasters elsewhere impelled withdrawal from Greece, thereby rendering occupation of Yugoslavia pointless. And it was finally the Red Army, not Tito's partisans, which impelled the Wehrmacht's departure.
It may have been postwar political necessity which required Tito to exaggerate the role of the internal resistance. A similar dynamic took place, Keegan says, in the postwar Soviet Union, where the resistance was played up to strengthen internal political solidarity (what Keegan doesn't say is that this may have been done to camouflage the considerable incidence of collaboration with the German occupiers by Ukrainians, White Russians, and other groups). But partisan activity was only militarily significant after mid-to-late 1943, when the tide had long since turned against the Germans and many partisan groups ceased to be territorially isolated from the main body of the Red Army.
Nowhere was the contrast between myth and reality so stark as in France. General de Gaulle's political need to efface the shame of defeat, occupation, and collaboration met the romanticizing tendencies of Anglo-American war correspondents, and a legend was born. But Keegan's assertion is stark: for most of the war, the 30-50 German occupation divisions took no part in anti-resistance activities whatsoever; stationed near the coast, to repel invasion, they where not so situated in any case. He then drops this astounding tidbit: the number of actual anti-resistance security forces in France (the Feldsicherheitsdienst) probably did not exceed 6500 at any stage of the war. That in a country of over 40 million!
And so on, throughout Europe. The ferocious German reprisals against the Greek population were such that SOE liaison officers, who had initially been parachuted in to incite resistance, eventually restrained their Greek charges from attacking German targets. Over the more than one million square miles of occupied Europe, Keegan estimates fewer than seven percent of German ground forces were diverted to internal security duties; and those were generally poorer quality units in any case. Contrast this with the present, when half the U.S. military's ground combat force is tied up by an insurgency in a much more confined area among a smaller population.
Summing up, Keegan suggests that the intellectuals, celebrities, and publicity-mad eccentrics drawn to the SOE and OSS made it natural that their feats of derring-do, and those of the resistance in general, would receive a somewhat florid and puffed-up treatment in postwar historiography.
The 4GW Conundrum
The mystery of World War II resistance, and its inability to demonstrate the true characteristics of 4GW, deepens upon examination of the cold war. Rather than four years’ occupation by a Quisling government, the peoples of Eastern Europe endured forty. But in those few cases where discontent broke into armed resistance (East Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, or unarmed resistance in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968), the Red Army swiftly put it down, and it was unable to re-start itself. Why was this so?
Why was the one successful case of 4GW against the Soviet Union precisely in Afghanistan? Was it solely on account of the forbidding mountain terrain or massive outside assistance? If that is the case, why are the insurgents in the flat, urbanized terrain of Iraq so successful against the occupying coalition?
The difficulty is that while many persons have described what 4GW is, they have as yet been unable convincingly to say why it takes root in some situations and not others — even when, as in the case of the OSS and the CIA egging on anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet populations, there is copious outside assistance added to immense local discontent. The anecdotal evidence discussed thus far suggests 4GW may be more likely when Third World populations resist Western occupation forces; perhaps settled European populations are immune to the phenomenon.
But how does this explain Northern Ireland? Or the numerous Third World insurgencies against their own indigenous governments, as in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Colombia? We have perhaps entered a realm where military strategy and tactics tell us less than comparative anthropology.
4GW: Welcome to the Post-Modern World
To return to Keegan, one of his premier examples of the failure of national insurgency to defeat conventional occupation forces was the Warsaw rising of August 1944. He says that "for all the bravery and suffering of the Polish Home Army . . . [it did] not seriously undermine Hitler's ability to maintain order within Poland at large while continuing to maintain an effective defense against the Red Army."
Shift to Fallujah. It bears some features similar to the Warsaw rising, albeit on a smaller scale. The strategic results are different. Bill Lind has persuasively argued that in retaking Fallujah, the U.S. military not only suffered a strategic moral defeat in the age of al Jazeera and weblogs, but operationally ceded greater initiative to the insurgents elsewhere in Iraq (notably in Mosul, a much larger city).
This disparity in strategic and operational results may at first blush stem from the conventional wisdom that U.S. occupation authorities are much more chivalrous and forbearing in their approach to war than other occupiers. Accordingly, as the lap-top Clausewitzes on Fox News would have it, the insurgents take unfair military advantage of our gullible good nature. One can readily stipulate that the extensive rubble of Fallujah is not the total ruin of Warsaw, but one should not make too much of this argument.
It is not just the "isolated incidents" at Abu Ghraib that weaken America's moral case in these matters. Most of the 300,000 inhabitants of Fallujah now dwell in tent cities in the desert. The press reports that in order to return, they will have to undergo retina scans and DNA sampling. Once resettled in Fallujah, they may only leave their houses (assuming they haven't been destroyed) if they wear large visible identification showing their street addresses. [2]
But Warsaw and Fallujah as contrasting examples of the evolution of war have a deeper cultural meaning than merely as a comparison of the ferocity of the fighting or the resulting destruction. Towards the end of the battle for Warsaw, with his position hopeless, the commander of the Polish Home Army, General Bor-Komorowski, proposed a negotiated surrender to the German commander, the infamous Waffen SS General von dem Bach-Zelewski, through the agency of the Polish Red Cross. Since the Western allies had recognized the Home Army as a legitimate combatant, Bach-Zelewski conceded that the surrender could be accepted — with military honors. Photographs exist of the ceremony.
Why did this brutal SS officer even entertain the charade of "honorable surrender" as at Appomattox, and why did Bor-Komorowski entertain the hope? Why, after the Germans had made a charnel house of Poland and done all their horrible deeds? Didn't the Poles know what awaited them? We can only surmise it was a habit of mind based on deep cultural patterns in Western civilization regnant at the time: the idea of war essentially as a tournament, a jousting match between nation-states, with rules, a game with a beginning and an end no matter how brutally and atrociously it may have been fought.
Does anyone now believe the Iraqi insurgents will come to the conclusion that the game is up and propose a surrender with military honors? Does anyone imagine the United States Army would even go through the motions of accepting it? Could the Red Cross ever serve as an intermediary between combatants in Iraq? We pose these questions not to cast aspersions, but to show how the modern age that dawned in the Renaissance is no longer alive — World War II was the last gasp of modernity, industrialism, and linearity. It was the last gasp of the conceit that the profession of arms was a calling with its own rigid code, something socially distinct from society.
The post-modern age we live in functions by different rules. In the realm of warfare, the rules are closer to tribal war, or the Wars of Religion, or drug smuggling than they are to Yorktown or Austerlitz or Anzio. There is no front, there is no safe haven or separation between combatants and non-combatants. [3] There is no high-tech device that will render us invulnerable. There is no mutually agreed ceremony concluding events, only a unilateral photo-op which fools no one except a gullible domestic audience.
by Werther*
December 30, 2004
* Werther is the pen name of a defense analyst based in Northern Virginia .
D-N-I.net's recently posted briefing on Iraq as a case study of Fourth Generation Warfare, or 4GW [1] should be mandatory reading for the men who rule the United States. It is long past time: the twenty-one months that have elapsed between the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the present quagmire nearly equal the period between the landing on Tarawa and the surrender at Tokyo Bay — or Gettysburg and Appomattox.
Those comparisons raise a significant issue: how is it that in the past, an American nation much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched opponents, could prevail against its enemies more quickly than a state with an $11-trillion GDP and a defense budget approaching $500 billion (bear in mind, the Bush Administration is preparing a budget supplemental of about $80 billion for the current fiscal year) against 10-20,000 insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP less than the turnover of a large corporation?
4GW theory gives us a partial answer. Insurgency warriors try to avoid, rather than seek, decisive battles. The more prolonged the war, the more the occupiers become confused and exhausted, and the more they employ counterproductive tactics. There is no Pickett's Charge to decide the issue one way or another. These precepts, however, should be present in popular insurgencies dating from the remote abysm of time. Instead, they raise questions:
*
Why are they common only after the Second World War — Algeria, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Chiapas, Colombia, and now, most spectacularly, in those sections of the Arab heartland occupied by Israel and the United States?
*
Why does 4GW fit the tenor of the times, while the conventional conflicts the U.S. military trains for and the U.S. taxpayer pays for increasingly emit a whiff of the antique?
Popular insurgencies and guerrilla campaigns containing aspects of 4GW are of course a feature of all recorded history: from the Roman campaign in Spain though Francis Marion in the American War of Independence to the Moro insurgency during the Theodore Roosevelt administration. It is our purpose here to examine why an episodic and secondary phenomenon of warfare has become the dominant means of armed conflict only in the present age.
But be forewarned: there are more questions than answers.
T.E. Lawrence: Precursor to 4GW or Desert Sideshow?
Military writers cite the World War I exploits of Colonel T.E. Lawrence as a model for current 4GW operations, but this example requires qualification. His Bedouin allies’ tactics against the Turks were militarily effective and offer a case book for later insurgencies, particularly in the Arab Middle East. But they were hardly the largest headache the Ottoman Turks faced: at most, the Revolt in the Desert was an adjunct to the British Empire's conventional military campaigns staged along three axes: the Dardanelles, the Sinai, and Mesopotamia. At the same time, the Turks were fighting a large-scale conventional campaign against Russia in the Caucasus.
In other theaters of that conflict, insurgency against occupation was barely detectable: Belgium, Northern France, Poland and Russia, even the Balkans (where Serbian national resistance consisted of successfully withdrawing its army, the king included, to Corfu). One might make a partial exception of Ireland, but the fact remains that the Easter Rebellion was quickly crushed and remained crushed for the duration of the war, and far more Irish served loyally (and suicidally) in British colors than for the Republican cause.
Amid four years of unprecedented violence, perhaps the most successful act of national resistance of World War I was the studied refusal of the various minorities of the Habsburg Empire to be obedient and self-sacrificial soldiers. This weakening of the Central Powers’ military resources presented Germany with a strategic dilemma — it could not be sufficiently strong on both fronts simultaneously so as to achieve decisive victory — that was fatal. The Good Soldier Schweik syndrome, however, was a radically different dynamic than what the United States faces in Iraq, the Israelis in Palestine, or the Russians in Chechnya.
The Good War and the Myth of the Resistance
At first sight, World War II offers a more hopeful case study for 4GW-style armed resistance against military occupation. "Now set Europe ablaze!" was Winston Churchill's 1940 directive to the Special Operations Executive, his newly minted organization designed to catalyze, supply, and direct popular armed resistance to German occupation of the European continent. Likewise, the exploits of its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services, and the rapid postwar preferment of such alumni as William Casey and William Colby suggest the importance of World War II as a seed bed for violent insurgency against unpopular military occupiers.
There is some truth in this edifying tale, perhaps; but not much. An interesting refutation of the myth of the resistance is found in John Keegan's book The Second World War (1989). Mr. Keegan has subsequently written some flawed analyses of both the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the U.S. invasion of Iraq (seeing in both cases the false dawn of a new era of warfare dominated by air power and/or highly technological forces patterned on current U.S. doctrine); his opinions on temporally more distant events, whereby the ruminative process winnows out political fads, is sounder.
His emphatic conclusion is that the resistance was never more than the barest pinprick inconveniencing the German occupation; even in Yugoslavia, where conditions were most favorable to local insurgents, the Axis was never in danger of losing what it valued: its lines of communication to the Aegean and flank protection for the Ploesti oil fields and its operations in Southern Russia. Germany lost its grip on Yugoslavia only after conventional military disasters elsewhere impelled withdrawal from Greece, thereby rendering occupation of Yugoslavia pointless. And it was finally the Red Army, not Tito's partisans, which impelled the Wehrmacht's departure.
It may have been postwar political necessity which required Tito to exaggerate the role of the internal resistance. A similar dynamic took place, Keegan says, in the postwar Soviet Union, where the resistance was played up to strengthen internal political solidarity (what Keegan doesn't say is that this may have been done to camouflage the considerable incidence of collaboration with the German occupiers by Ukrainians, White Russians, and other groups). But partisan activity was only militarily significant after mid-to-late 1943, when the tide had long since turned against the Germans and many partisan groups ceased to be territorially isolated from the main body of the Red Army.
Nowhere was the contrast between myth and reality so stark as in France. General de Gaulle's political need to efface the shame of defeat, occupation, and collaboration met the romanticizing tendencies of Anglo-American war correspondents, and a legend was born. But Keegan's assertion is stark: for most of the war, the 30-50 German occupation divisions took no part in anti-resistance activities whatsoever; stationed near the coast, to repel invasion, they where not so situated in any case. He then drops this astounding tidbit: the number of actual anti-resistance security forces in France (the Feldsicherheitsdienst) probably did not exceed 6500 at any stage of the war. That in a country of over 40 million!
And so on, throughout Europe. The ferocious German reprisals against the Greek population were such that SOE liaison officers, who had initially been parachuted in to incite resistance, eventually restrained their Greek charges from attacking German targets. Over the more than one million square miles of occupied Europe, Keegan estimates fewer than seven percent of German ground forces were diverted to internal security duties; and those were generally poorer quality units in any case. Contrast this with the present, when half the U.S. military's ground combat force is tied up by an insurgency in a much more confined area among a smaller population.
Summing up, Keegan suggests that the intellectuals, celebrities, and publicity-mad eccentrics drawn to the SOE and OSS made it natural that their feats of derring-do, and those of the resistance in general, would receive a somewhat florid and puffed-up treatment in postwar historiography.
The 4GW Conundrum
The mystery of World War II resistance, and its inability to demonstrate the true characteristics of 4GW, deepens upon examination of the cold war. Rather than four years’ occupation by a Quisling government, the peoples of Eastern Europe endured forty. But in those few cases where discontent broke into armed resistance (East Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, or unarmed resistance in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968), the Red Army swiftly put it down, and it was unable to re-start itself. Why was this so?
Why was the one successful case of 4GW against the Soviet Union precisely in Afghanistan? Was it solely on account of the forbidding mountain terrain or massive outside assistance? If that is the case, why are the insurgents in the flat, urbanized terrain of Iraq so successful against the occupying coalition?
The difficulty is that while many persons have described what 4GW is, they have as yet been unable convincingly to say why it takes root in some situations and not others — even when, as in the case of the OSS and the CIA egging on anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet populations, there is copious outside assistance added to immense local discontent. The anecdotal evidence discussed thus far suggests 4GW may be more likely when Third World populations resist Western occupation forces; perhaps settled European populations are immune to the phenomenon.
But how does this explain Northern Ireland? Or the numerous Third World insurgencies against their own indigenous governments, as in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Colombia? We have perhaps entered a realm where military strategy and tactics tell us less than comparative anthropology.
4GW: Welcome to the Post-Modern World
To return to Keegan, one of his premier examples of the failure of national insurgency to defeat conventional occupation forces was the Warsaw rising of August 1944. He says that "for all the bravery and suffering of the Polish Home Army . . . [it did] not seriously undermine Hitler's ability to maintain order within Poland at large while continuing to maintain an effective defense against the Red Army."
Shift to Fallujah. It bears some features similar to the Warsaw rising, albeit on a smaller scale. The strategic results are different. Bill Lind has persuasively argued that in retaking Fallujah, the U.S. military not only suffered a strategic moral defeat in the age of al Jazeera and weblogs, but operationally ceded greater initiative to the insurgents elsewhere in Iraq (notably in Mosul, a much larger city).
This disparity in strategic and operational results may at first blush stem from the conventional wisdom that U.S. occupation authorities are much more chivalrous and forbearing in their approach to war than other occupiers. Accordingly, as the lap-top Clausewitzes on Fox News would have it, the insurgents take unfair military advantage of our gullible good nature. One can readily stipulate that the extensive rubble of Fallujah is not the total ruin of Warsaw, but one should not make too much of this argument.
It is not just the "isolated incidents" at Abu Ghraib that weaken America's moral case in these matters. Most of the 300,000 inhabitants of Fallujah now dwell in tent cities in the desert. The press reports that in order to return, they will have to undergo retina scans and DNA sampling. Once resettled in Fallujah, they may only leave their houses (assuming they haven't been destroyed) if they wear large visible identification showing their street addresses. [2]
But Warsaw and Fallujah as contrasting examples of the evolution of war have a deeper cultural meaning than merely as a comparison of the ferocity of the fighting or the resulting destruction. Towards the end of the battle for Warsaw, with his position hopeless, the commander of the Polish Home Army, General Bor-Komorowski, proposed a negotiated surrender to the German commander, the infamous Waffen SS General von dem Bach-Zelewski, through the agency of the Polish Red Cross. Since the Western allies had recognized the Home Army as a legitimate combatant, Bach-Zelewski conceded that the surrender could be accepted — with military honors. Photographs exist of the ceremony.
Why did this brutal SS officer even entertain the charade of "honorable surrender" as at Appomattox, and why did Bor-Komorowski entertain the hope? Why, after the Germans had made a charnel house of Poland and done all their horrible deeds? Didn't the Poles know what awaited them? We can only surmise it was a habit of mind based on deep cultural patterns in Western civilization regnant at the time: the idea of war essentially as a tournament, a jousting match between nation-states, with rules, a game with a beginning and an end no matter how brutally and atrociously it may have been fought.
Does anyone now believe the Iraqi insurgents will come to the conclusion that the game is up and propose a surrender with military honors? Does anyone imagine the United States Army would even go through the motions of accepting it? Could the Red Cross ever serve as an intermediary between combatants in Iraq? We pose these questions not to cast aspersions, but to show how the modern age that dawned in the Renaissance is no longer alive — World War II was the last gasp of modernity, industrialism, and linearity. It was the last gasp of the conceit that the profession of arms was a calling with its own rigid code, something socially distinct from society.
The post-modern age we live in functions by different rules. In the realm of warfare, the rules are closer to tribal war, or the Wars of Religion, or drug smuggling than they are to Yorktown or Austerlitz or Anzio. There is no front, there is no safe haven or separation between combatants and non-combatants. [3] There is no high-tech device that will render us invulnerable. There is no mutually agreed ceremony concluding events, only a unilateral photo-op which fools no one except a gullible domestic audience.