Friday - January 16, 2004

Category Image It's a Generational Thing


My first boss in the Marine Corps and her husband, also once my boss, sent me this article by William S. Lind and asked for my opinion of it. Since she is a Marine Corps Colonel and a graduate of the Naval War College, I was flattered to be asked. Here's a version of my response.


Mr. Lind is a fuzzy thinker. He creates a false set of definitions, and then uses these to create arguments and conclusions that have little relation to reality. He lives in a think tank and his livelihood depends on him convincing others that he has come up with revolutionary new ways of looking at the world. He is in the business of selling paradigm shifts, and it is wise to look carefully before we buy his wares.

First, I don't like Lind's nomenclature of calling these four "generations" of war, implying a progression of style of warfare. After spending a few pages saying that war has progressed through four generations, he ends by claiming that he said no such thing, that these generations are just styles that come and go. In that characterization, he is closer to the truth but he is still wrong. He doesn't come out and say it outright, but he appears to be among those who would get rid of our heavy military in favor of light, supposedly more mobile forces, forgetting that we just finished winning a war only because we had those heavy forces and the next potential enemies, i.e., Iran, Syria, China, North Korea, won't be impressed by light infantry.

Simply put, here are his "generations:"

1st Gen = Line and column tactics
2nd Gen = Artillery/bombardment tactics
3rd Gen = Maneuver/Blitzkrieg tactics
4th Gen = Culture

Notice that Mr. Lind makes no mention of the importance of siegecraft, a vital part of warfare even today. For the sake of the reader's time, I won't go into it either except to note that it hasn't gone away.

Let's ignore the non sequitur of the fourth generation definition and look at the first three for now. He somehow claims that line and column tactics, in place since time immemorial, were somehow newly in place in the magic year of 1648 because of the Treaty of Westphalia. This is preposterous. The Greek Phalanx, the Roman Legions, and every military since and before used line and column tactics. This is a factor of human nature, and we have not seen the end of line and column tactics. As the numbers of people in a war increase, and the military capability on each side is relatively the same, line and column tactics will be important again. The definition of a line may change as scale of offensive power increases, but the concept is the same. That is, armies may not stand shoulder to shoulder, but the movement of armies in lines and columns, even when inserted via air mobile, truck mobile, or even water mobile conveyence will always be important.

The degree of importance of maintaining these formations changes with the enemy capability, but the concept is the same. That is, in Iraq we had a few very large columns driving into the Iraqi lines. Because our capability was so much higher than the Iraqis, we were able to move with much less concern for integrity of lines or for our lines of communication because the enemy wasn't able to exploit any chink in our lines. Line and column tactics are and will always be the basis of any military action and nothing that I have ever seen changes that reality.

What Mr. Lind calls a second generation is no such thing. Artillery and bombardment only change things in that weaknesses in the enemy can be created for the lines and columns to exploit. Stand off weapons can destroy the enemy lines and columns directly, or the control of those lines by hitting command and control facilities.

Mr. Lind then goes off on a tangent in his discussion of the third generation, being sure to tell us that he is solely responsible for the Marines embracing his ideas of maneuver, and telling us that the only ones to ever understand it fully were the Germans in the Second World War. So once we get past his promotion of his think tank, we can understand that maneuver warfare is not new as a concept per se, and I'm sure he would admit to this.

Alexander the Great used maneuver warfare, as did many other military leaders who were often referred to by Lind or others in extolling its virtues. What has changed is our ability to use maneuver warfare in the face of long range weaponry. Our technology of command and control (C3I or whatever is the latest acronym fad), our long range logistics capability, and our ability to put all our forces on a very mobile platform, have significantly enlarged our mobility envelope. It's the tremendous mobility of our modern military that increases the amount of terrain available to maneuver in. With our current capability, once they are in theater we can essentially maneuver heavy land forces within radii of thousands of miles quickly and easily. Once the troop strength begins to fill the terrain available, and the two opponents are somewhat evenly matched in capability, maneuver becomes less potent, and we're back to static lines with fewer columns.


Photo of Boxster and Tank by Gottfried Hogh

So now we're at today, and Mr. Lind is in need of promoting his think tank again. He accuses the rest of the world with not being as smart as he is, so he volunteers his leadership in forming a seminar. This is nice, except that his ideas are pretty muddled.

He says that we're now in a fourth generation of war. The problem is that his first three generations, which are not progressive developments by his own admission later in the essay, are all about tactics and what he calls the fourth generation is a declaration of the motivation of why a war is fought. He's absolutely correct that this war is culturally and religiously motivated (except that it's not politically correct to ascribe religious motivation to the religious war they are fighting against us), but this changes nothing about tactics.

Mr. Lind claims that we had a failure in Afghanistan because we failed to encircle the enemy. This has nothing to do with fourth generation (whatever that is) and everything to do with our inability to deploy an expeditionary unit larger than a brigade without shipping units overland from seaports. If we failed in basic lines and columns, which he calls first generation, it would have been because we didn't have enough troops. What is his recommended solution? Less mobility. That is, he recommends better foot mobility. This is like wanting to be better at rubbing sticks together when we have a bunch of blow torches at our disposal. I'm not going to argue that we shouldn't have an infantry that can march long distances for sustained periods, but this is not the way to out-maneuver an enemy. Moving by foot puts us in the category of mobility no better than Alexander the Great. In the age of the automobile and aircraft, this is not a long term solution.

Mr. Lind's entire mushy discussion of what he recommends in our new so-called fourth generation of war is correct in calling this a war of culture, but wrong in how to address it.

As with all problems, this one is best solved by correctly identifying its cause. The war in Iraq that we are waging against the Ba'athist regime is largely over. Insurgents will be around for a while, but our tactics and objectives have been effective in neutering the potency of the old regime. They'll still be around for a while, but their time is coming to an end. If that were the only problem, we'd be nearly done. It's mostly a political struggle now.

The problem is that the regime change that we caused has drawn in our real enemies, as the war was designed in some part to do. The real, long term enemy is radical Islam. This is a cultural or religious war. Notice that in southern Iraq now that the Ba'athists wane in power the Shi'ites with Iranian influence are exerting more muscle.

Mr. Lind is correct that this religious war is a war outside of traditional nation state definitions. But that is only because we have let nation states off the hook. We choose not to hold them responsible for the people in their nations. Thus these people are free to develop their organizations and their religious hatred and export their violence to Iraq and to other nations, even our own.

This is now again a political and religious conflict, until we identify the next nation state that we will hold responsible. We have let this overt jihad to be waged against us without a response for nearly three decades now, and it has spread throughout the world. It will take time to conquer it. We are on the right track by felling the regime most likely to support it with overt malice, and by establishing a free government in its place. The risk we face there now is not military in nature, it is political. Solving political problems is much harder.

The will of the people to support us is related to keeping the jihadist movement down. This has nothing to do with military capabilities or "generations" of warfare. This is a war of ideas held in the minds of individuals. These individuals must stop holding these ideas, or we must kill them. So far, we have a lot of people yet to kill or convert. Conversion is painstakingly slow, speeded up only by making holding those ideas more deadly and painful than rejecting them. This will not happen through military tactics, except in invading nations and changing more and more regimes. This is our eventual path. We haven't the resources, or more correctly the will, to do it all at once, our only option is to finish stabilizing Iraq before destroying the next source of our enemies. Our occupation of Iraq allows us to threaten to reach out and do this much more credibly to the other dangerous regimes in the theater. Hopefully, the nation states harboring these religious fanatics will take heed and eliminate these ideas before we get to them next.

Our specific tactics in Iraq for now should be to withdraw from overt presence as much as is feasible and become as unnoticed as possible by the population as we can while at the same time destroying those who subvert the peace.

We need no paradigm shift or Mr. Lind's poor ideas. We need to continue on the general path that we are on. We are winning, slowly but surely, a war that will only be possible to win in toto after generations have passed.


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