FourthGenerationWar

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Been reading an interesting [Strategy weblog] - set of columns about how things are going in Iraq and why. Fairly non-political, which is a breath of fresh air.

Most interesting is to see which of his predictions have come tue - and which haven't. --Vitenka

Heh, sorry - was in the middle of reading the article and finding out. The 'generations' of war that he posits are:
Zero - Pre-history to middle ages - tribal.
One - Up to napoleonic era - states, organised, heirachical, inflexible, mercenary.
Two - World war one - applied firepower. Casualty counts above all else.
Three - Winning world war two - the change to operational tactics. Flexibility ranked above firepower.
Four - Tribal flexibility.

He seems to talk a lot about "Winning the battle but losing the war for minds", moral above mental above physical - and how state boundaries don't matter to those doing the fighting.
He ranks the bombing in Spain as the biggest triumph to date of this kind of warfare, and mocks a lot of Americas problems as being due to seeing firepower as the solution to everything. (And a lot of the rhetoric from the US army is pretty bad...)

Also makes a lot of the 'learning loop' that forces in war (should) go through, and how it is even more important in current wars where it includes civilian and political entites.

One nugget I found was the possibility that 'terrorists' (for want of a better all inclusive label) might sign up to a chivalric code of conduct. The problem being that many such organisations have openly stated that they consider all citizens of their opposed regiemes to be warriors... --Vitenka (Hey, maybe we could make the women safe though)

One interesting thought is that while I (and others) were seeing the situation in Iraq as hopeless, at least some people were looking at it as something slightly new that needed to be addressed and coming up with... well, ideas anyway.

Nothing's up about the current (end Oct '04) hostage taking, though. I'd be interested to see his thoughts on that. --Vitenka

You might want to bear in mind that William S. Lind is a total fruitcake with very questionable judgement in some areas. [evidence] [evidence] --Pallando

: Yep, right-wing anti-commy reactionary propoganda. Grains of truth there though, or maybe half-truth. And the bottom line: behind it all is KarlMarx?, ergo it's evil. So much for, "Test everything; hold on to the truth." --B
: Fruitcake? Just looks like any other right-wing conservative to me, TBH. - MoonShadow

CategorySerious, CategoryWar.