A Brief History…

I have been reading a very impressive book by Thomas X Hammes a retired Marine Corps colonel. The book is a history and explanation of what he calls “Fourth Generation War” or 4GW for short. He begins with the Napoleonic Wars, which were First Generation and the first of the national army campaigns. Before Napoleon, even with the Romans, armies were small and and the means at their disposal were limited. The US Civil War began the evolution to Second Generation War with the development of the railroad and the telegraph that allowed the control of large armies. The weapons were also far more lethal than those of Napoleon’s soldiers. He makes the point that the new forms of warfare evolve over a long time. From Napoleon to World War I was more than a century. Third Generation War began to evolve in 1915 as the Germans learned maneuver warfare in the Russian campaign. It culminated in World War II and Blitzkreig. From 1915 to the great maneuver battles of World War II was only 30 years. History was accelerating.

Fourth Generation Warfare began with Mao Zedong, and Hammes makes the point that Mao was still learning his tactics in World War II although he began in 1926 to deviate from the Communist principles that relied on an urban proletariat as the backbone of revolution. China had little in the way of urban Communists and Mao began to use the peasants as his base. He was opposed by his Communist colleagues for deviating from dogma but the regime of Chang Kai Shek was far more successful against the urban cadres than Mao’s peasant supported columns. The Nationalists used techniques pioneered by the British in the Boer War. Hammes calls this the “Blockhouse and railroad” method, in which the regime established strongpoints dividing up the countryside and supported them with rapid response reserves traveling on railroads. We will see this technique used again and again. I don’t know enough about the Boers to know why Hammes does not consider their methods 4GW even before Mao.

The Nationalists wiped out most of the urban Communist cadres and Mao was forced to begin the Long March to Yenan Province in 1934. Only 5,000 of his followers survived the march. His principles were summarized in the “16 characters,” from his book on guerrilla war.  They translate as:

“The enemy advances: We withdraw
“The enemy rests: We harass
“The enemy tires: We attack
“The enemy withdraws: We pursue”

These rules would be applied by the Vietnamese against the French and the US. The Vienamese also modified the rules to use the advantages of propaganda against both the French and us. Here is where the inept use of the press and the new medium of television doomed our efforts. The Communists used the “Peace Movement” and such useful idiots as John Kerry and Jane Fonda to portray themselves as peasant reformers and us as imperialists. The North Vietnamese made major mistakes, however; the Tet offensive and the Easter offensive of 1972. Both resulted in slaughter of their Viet Cong cadres because they misjudged the “correlation of forces” that told Mao when it was time to attack with conventional tactics. In 1949, Chang was exhausted and the peasants were ready to throw him out. By 1972, the South Vietnamese were succeeding in the modified program of “blockhouse and railroad” that was the “Strategic Hamlet Program.” The Wkipedia article is the conventional leftist interpretation of the program but it was, in fact, the Diem family that lost their connection to the peasants and stopped learning. Under Creighton Abrams, the program was revived and was successful. Westmoreland and the “Five O’Clock Follies” had already discredited any US success. The South Vietnamese peasants, except for the Communist minority, never supported the North and that is why both conventional offensives failed. By 1975, however, the Democratic Congress had withdrawn all support from the ARVN and the 1975 offensive succeeded. Hammes does not accept the Harry G Summers concept that we failed because we did not wall off South Vietnam from the North. We failed because, like Nagl’s analysis of the war, Hammes believes we never adopted counterinsurgency tactics. The US Army was never interested in COIN tactics and learned nothing from Vietnam.

The next 4GW campaign that he covers in depth is Nicaragua, where The Sandinistas further modified the 4GW principles. The Sandinistas were urban middle class and they were never accepted by the peasants. This was an urban Communist cadre revolution but it succeeded only because they adopted new tactics, creating a “popular front” with anti-Somoza moderates. Once the war was won, they quickly abandoned their moderate allies. The Contras were largely made up of peasants who had never accepted the Sandinistas, partly for religious reasons although the young Liberation Theology priests who joined the Sandinistas added a veneer of Catholic support early on. A few of the priests actualy became revolutionaries and even government officials.

His later chapters show the origin of al Qeada and its further modification of 4GW tactics. He uses the analogy of a “Venture Capital” financier to explain Osama bin Laden. The Islamist network was well enough established in Afghanistan that, when it was scattered by the US invasion, there were enough cadres to set up a network and become self perpetuating. What later developed was a program in which small cells of the network could propose terrorist plans that, if they seemed to have a good chance of success, would be supported by bin Laden’s people. His major mistake, somewhat on the order of the Vietnamese mistake with the Tet Offensive, was the 9/11 attack. He had not been punished for the earlier attacks on the embassies and on the USS Cole. He assumed that the US would continue to accept punishment and eventually move out of the Middle East, his purpose in the campaign. The Afghanistan invasion and then the Iraq invasion were not anticipated and gave us the initiative. We lost some of that initiative by using ineffective tactics in the first few years of the insurgency. He is supportive of the concept even though the book was written before the “Surge” reversed the tactics and began to use 4GW concepts in counterinsurgency operations.

Tammes is retired after 29 years of service but he brings together the concepts of Nagl’s book and the new Field Manual wth the necessary historical perspective. I have not put it down since I began to read it two days ago and will finish tomorrow. I cannot emphasize too much how important this book is. I am reassured when I hear that it is one of the required books in almost every war college course. I have summarized the book and skipped other major sections, such as his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinan conflict. He believes that the Palestinians were in reach of their goals after the first Intifada, only to be undone by Arafat and “the Tunisians,” who knew nothing but indiscriminant terrorism. One of his precepts is that an insurgency of the 4GW type cannot be run from outside the country. This bodes well for Iraq although, perhaps, not so well for Afghanistan. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 6:32 pm and is filed under general, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.