William Lind: thoughts about 4GW, why we lose, and how we can win in the future

Summary: Twenty-five years ago, in October 1989, the Marine Corps Gazette published “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation”, by four active duty military officers and a civilian military historian. It explained that a new era of warfare had begun, sparked by the invention of nukes (rendering suicidal conventional war among major powers), brought to maturity by Mao (and improved by generations of success and failed insurgencies since then). We failed to learn how to fight these, as proven by our two failed wars after 9/11, the new bipartisan ones being launched now, and the future ones being prepared in Africa.

This series of posts will help you better understand our defeats and prepare you for what is to come. And, perhaps, help motivate you to join the effort to retake the reins of America. This is the second chapter, by guest author William Lind (the civilian co-author of Into the Fourth G). This is the first of two posts today.

Thoughts on the 25th anniversary

of the publication of the original article on

the Four Generations of Modern War

By William Lind

Since the publication of the original article in the Marine Corps Gazette, three things have happened.

First, events have justified the article’s description of the Fourth Generation as war that escapes the state framework. The high-tech alternative, which became known subsequently by a number of buzzwords — the Revolution in Military Affairs, Transformation, Net-Centric Warfare, etc. — is not where war has gone. Most of the high-tech systems we continue to buy have proven irrelevant to fighting non-state forces. So far, at least, the F-22 has not shot down a single Taliban flying carpet.

Second, the theory of 4GW has been expanded and refined, a process that will continue. The most important addition to the theory has been Martin van Creveld’s book, The Transformation of War. Tom Hammes’s book, The Sling and the Stone, while sound on the first three generations, has brought confusion to much of the discussion of 4GW because it gets the Fourth Generation wrong. Insurgency is not a dialectically qualitative change in war. It is merely one way in which war has been fought for a long time. As van Creveld puts it, 4GW is not a change in how war is fought (though it brings such changes) but in who fights and what they fight for. That is a dialectically qualitative change, the biggest since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

The third thing that has happened is actually a negative, i.e., something that did not happen. Despite overwhelming evidence that 4GW is the wave of the future (including four defeats of the U.S. armed forces by 4GW opponents: Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan), the U.S. military has not moved to prepare for it. It remains, and apparently will remain until covered by the lid of history’s trashcan, a Second Generation military. That is to say, it reduces war to putting firepower on targets.

The United States marine Corps did adopt Third Generation maneuver warfare as doctrine in the early 1990s, but the doctrine has remained words on paper. As Marines have said to me repeatedly since the FMFM 1, Warfighting, was published, “What the Marine Corps says is great, but it’s not what it does.”

The primary reason the American military remains stuck in the Second Generation, and intentionally ignores the Fourth, is money. At senior levels all that matters is the budget. So long as the budget stays high (and preferably grows) war does not matter. Losing wars, repeatedly, does not matter. As Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote, “{A} private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” That is a statement of literal fact, as the repeated promotions of senior field commanders who failed to higher positions, including service chief, demonstrates. All that matters is protecting the money flow.

That is institutional corruption, not merely monetary corruption but corruption of institutional purpose, on a grand scale. It presages an equally grand collapse, military, financial or both (I await both). It may take the American state with it, ushering in widespread 4GW on American soil.

The only way to revive the U.S. military as an institution with both interest in and competence at warfare is a massive purge of the senior leadership, uniformed and civilian, coupled with major budget cuts, larger reductions in the size of the officer corps and elimination of most contractors. The chances of that happening are the same as the chances of any other major reform program coming out of Washington. If you think those changes are more than zero, I own a great bridge up in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

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(2) About the author

William S. Lind s director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. He has a Master’s Degree in History from Princeton University in 1971. He worked as a legislative aide for armed services for Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio from 1973 through 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart of Colorado from 1977 through 1986. See his bio at Wikipedia

Mr. Lind is author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook (1985), co-author with Gary Hart of America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform (1986), and co-author with William H. Marshner of Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda (1987).

In April 1995 Lind published “Militant musings: From nightmare 1995 to my utopian 2050” in The Washington Post. He speculated about a future in which multiculturalism had broken apart the USA: a second civil war, followed by a recovery of our traditional Christian culture led by a new country: Victoria (i.e., it adopted Victorian values). He’s expanded this into a book: Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War , published under the pseudonym “Thomas Hobbes” (the theorist of the nation-state; author of Leviathan.

He’s perhaps best known for his articles about the long war, now published as On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 . See his other articles about a broad range of subjects…

(3) Posts in this series about 4GW, after 25 years of 4GW defeats

(4) For More Information

(a) To understand 4GW, I recommend starting with Lind’s “Understanding Fourth Generation War” (January 2004), “Strategic Defense Initiative” (November 2004), and “4GW is Alive and Well“ (May 2013).

(b) Why 4GW remains important: we keep stepping into them: Keep fighting! We must not learn from our wars., 5 December 2013

(c) About 4GW:

(d) Examples of 4GW:

(e) Chuck Spinney explains 4GW: Chuck Spinney asks why we choose to lose at 4GW.

(f) Chet Richards explains 4GW:

(g) Solutions to 4GW:

(h) How often do insurgents win using 4gW?

(5) The Evolution of Warfare

By Chet Richards (Colonel, USAF, retired). Click to enlarge.