FOURTH-GENERATION WAR AND OTHER MYTHS

As a follow up to the 10 December posting on 4th Generation warfare I found the following article rather enlightening.

Here's why: The very first thing that you ned to do either in business or in warfare is a strategic analysis of your competitor. How you appraoch that analysis can be critical to how you carry out your tactical plans. If the basic theory that you have come up with is flawed then how you handle the tactics thelselves can also be flawed. It is always best to keep an open mind to alternitvie ideas and even to recognize that although a "new" idea may have merit and be "fun" to talk about and postulate about sometimes it's good to go back and re-evaluate the entire theory and make sure that it is correct.

In the case of the following article I think you can see that the permise is hat we don't ned no stinkin new theory. In fact, our old theories work just fine.

I found that the key statement here, as always, was:
"In any case, German success on the battlefield depended more often than not on such factors as thorough planning, quality training, and decentralized leadership."

Or as Napolean said, "In war, it is not MEN, but the MAN who counts" The idea of decentralized leadership and permitting the guy in the field to make the decison he knows how best to decide based upon his or her pallnign and training i ave always felt was the key to success.

I think the discussion that Dr. Echevarria makes is very thought provoking:
"As we can see, each of the tendencies in Clausewitz’s wondrous trinity remains alive and well, even in the war on terror, which is precisely the kind of conflict that scholars such as van Creveld wrongly refer to as “nontrinitarian.” Strictly speaking, then, there is no such thing as trinitarian war because, as any review of history shows, the forces Clausewitz described are present in every war, not just the wars of nation-states. If they are present in every war, then the term must fall out as a discriminator. In other words, if the basis for making a distinction, any distinction, disappears, then the distinction itself also vanishes. It follows, then, that since there is no such thing as “trinitarian” war, per se, there can be no such thing as “nontrinitarian” war; the initial concept or idea has to exist before the idea that negates it can come into being. Nontrinitarian war is, therefore, nothing more than the negation of a misunderstanding. The proponents of 4GW failed to perceive this particular flaw in their reasoning because they did not review their theory critically; instead, they attempted to augment it with whatever ideas seemed in vogue at the time. "

So it must follow that instead of developing "new" strategy and tactcis for 4GW adn asymetric threats we merely need to adapt what we already know through thousands of years of warfighting. hmmmmm. Now, THAT is worth pondering for a bit.

hmmmm "...thorough planning, quality training, and decentralized leadership."

oh, and I liked the follwoing statement... it goes back to my comments earleir on the "TERRORISM 101" blog:
"Still, even its tactics are not the psychological “judo throw” envisioned by 4GW theorists, but an attempt to inflict as many casualties and as much destruction as possible in the hope of provoking a response massive enough to trigger a general uprising by the Islamic community. "