JOURNAL: Ignoring 4GW

I've heard it from reliable sources that the Army/Marine Corps new Counterisurgency Field Manual doesn't have a single mention of fourth generation warfare (4GW) in the entire document. Also, confidential insight into how the begrudging addition of references to non-state foes were made to the document points to a process that combines the not invented here syndrome and consensus editing. In contrast, Jihadi strategists have provided generous references to 4GW in their writing. Is this an asymmetry in innovation at the theoretical level too?

Comments

[bobechs]

If you want to read the final draft of the manual, it is online at:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf

[bobechs]

Given your perspective, you might be particularly interesred in Appendix E regarding networks in COIN operations.

Also, for comparison purposes the current interim manual is also online at:

www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fmi3-07-22.pdf

[TM Lutas]

After perusing the manual a bit, it's pretty clear that they're addressing the phenomena without using that particular term.

[Andy]

They don't even use the term. Hammes is mentioned a few times, Lind not at all - although there are more than a few passages pulled almost directly out of the draft FMFM 1-A that Lind and his band of thinkers compiled.

All that being said, it's a decent manual, although it's 300 pages long. I pine for the days of the simple USMC manuals of the 1980s' that said everything that needed to be said and were about 50 pages long.

[Cavolonero]

They'll call it " asymetric " sometimes, but otherwise it's just war.

[P-]

A high degree of specialization is required in the area of 4GW than can be written up for a field manual(just an opinion). I feel it has a high degree of intel(info) and flexibility of synergies (component) maybe required to counter such forces especially in the 21st century, effectively. This is not mainly directed at the Army or Marine Corp directly but across mainly traditional organizations, intelligence, military, crime enforcement, and many other departments and our foreign friends and their associates included. Could be that is just a plain simple explanation that the threshold of need hasn't been reached significantly to warrant such a dgree of writeup for a filed manual. Needless to say it be interesting if we'll as the general public ever learn the details of such programs inititated by the government internally to be able to effectively keep up with such threats and most importantly maintain the initiative. My guess is we won't.

P-

[Veteran]

Perhaps they should memorize "the Art of War" before embarking on another disaster?

[John Robb]

At a minimum, your strategy has to reflect your opponent's strategy. Otherwise it is an effort at navel gazing (a good way to describe the effects of isolation on the development of theory). If all the Jihadi thinking/writing/doing is pointing to 4GW and increasingly global guerrilla theory (although, in regards to my work, more in what they say/do than from a specific reference), then you should at least recognize this in the document.

[MDE]

That's because 4GW is an ill-conceived and mis-attibuted term. What Hammes describes in his writings (most notoriously in a couple of his briefs and in his book "Sling and Stone") is what he has termed 4GW but what he is making a buck off of is really not a new concept at all. Rather arrogantly, after his experiences in Iraq it was new to him so, therefore he assumed, it must be new to everyone. The Special Ops community operators and planners reject his approach outright(although he describes unconventional warfare and asymmetric warfare fairly accurately, but from an amateurish perspective). He makes his first fateful paradigm error when he states that the services collectively neglected unconventional warfare throughout the nineties. First of all, the "services" collectively never had their eye on the ball in the first place, and second, the proponent agencies very much continued to develop UW concepts and actively train their forces. If he had been cognizant of what was really happening in, say, the Special Forces community, I hope he would not have said that. How does he explain the success of OEF in 2001 if UW was ignored and neglected? We and the ten-pound brains within the beltway and senior executives all over DoD, DoS, USSOCOM, etc. would be well-advised to leave Hammes and his "new" concepts on the shelf.

[Adam]

MDE,

I think you're missing the point. The Special Operations people can think whatever they like, but they have very little input into either actual strategy or military purchasing which is where 4GW bites. Special Operations are nice, photogenic, even sexy. What they aren't is terribly important in conquering nations which is what we're talking about.

Operation Enduring Freedom is an interesting example for you to choose as most would say that it was a failure. It took a month to begin operations, most of that due to military planning which took 26 days to complete. Please note these facts - the US military still does not consider a fast, effective global response to be important despite billions spent on just this. Neither does it have plans for fighting in nations that it has recently bombed. Oddly, in that month the Taliban and Al Quaeda moved, imagine that... Because Pentagon planners didn't.

The military objectives of Operation Enduring Freedom, as articulated by Bush were:
a)the destruction of terrorist training camps and infrastructure within Afghanistan
b) the capture of al Qaeda leaders, and
c) the cessation of terrorist activities in Afghanistan.

A is highly arguable. B is a clear failure and C is a clear failure. A, B and C are also signs that the original plan wasn't connected to reality but thats another argument.

The Enduring Freedom operation took 78 days to conquer Afghanistan, giving plenty of time to relocate assets. Roughly 90% of the core Taliban forces are believed to have moved to Pakistan, roughly 40,000 men in all, whilst the remainder simply switched sides to the Northern Alliance (presumably to swtich back later - no one is loyal to anyone in Afghanistan after 30 years of war). This is how the NA were able to take over 90% of the country with 10% of the troops.

Overall my impression on actually reading the document was surprise at how damning it was.

"Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war". I blinked on seeing that so lets here that again: "Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war". The generals now say that - after the many and various issues of morality of the US invasion of Iraq - the war is lost. Still, no reason for the press at large to pick that one up.

Lets look at the document from 976 to 1038. If that isn't a pithy list of everything the US hasn't done in Iraq I don't know what is.

Now lets look at 1041, the list of unsuccessful practices, are there any that the US missed? Did the US do any of the successful practises? Hardly.

The standard debate has been whether whether the war's disasters were predictable and avoidable, predictable and inevitable, or completely unpredictable. It seems clear that the military are coming down towards predictable and avoidable. That would annoy the neo-cons who tend towards the other two theories (tended to be phrased as either a: its not our fault or b) shit happens).

Either way in this doucment the military have spoken and they are saying that Iraq has been a defeat. Next they'll be looking to explain how they lost and so they'll be shifting the blame onto the politicians.

[MDE]

Adam,

You seem to have missed the fact that USSOCOM is in charge of the GWOT. You are also mistaking Special Operations for Hollywood-Spec Ops -- your comment is completely Direct Action-focused, which isn't entirely your fault because many senior officers in the military are also. If you do a little research, you'll find that the lion's share of USSOCOM's actual operator population is not DA-focused, they are centered around Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense at the tactical-operational level.
Your remark about taking a month to begin operations in OEF is wrong. What you saw in the news took a month or more. If you rely on the news, you are starting off in the back of the short bus.
You'll also find that your remark about not being terribly important in conquering nations is erroneous as well. have you ever heard of Operation Viking Hammer? Let's just say it was pivotal in tying down several Iraqi divisions during the war(OIF). Viking Hammer was before the war, expoiting relationships fostered during Desert Storm and maintained throughout the 1990s. Not a single conventional unit was involved. What conventional unit participated in OEF prior to the fall of Kandahar? Not a one.
In December of 2001, not a single branch of the Taliban infrastructure (and, therefore, AQ) remained operational and most were no longer even intact. That is why they ran to Paktia, Gardez, Khost and Waziristan. What has been developed since is an example of natural ebb and flow of unconventional warfare within a fractured society. Operations have been so successful against those areas that the Taliban has adjusted its lines of communication around all the way to Balochistan and up into Lashkar Gah and greater Helmand province. That is also where the Iranians have complicated things by supporting various warlords to keep the balance of power unstable. Your assessment of A as arguable is somewhat true, though not in the way you meant it.
Next, you are focused on what we call the "bright and shiny" when it comes to your assessment of OEF success/failure. Going after the High Value Targets is cool -- it makes the news when it goes right (vis a vis AMZ's timely death a month ago). Just because HVT numbers 1,2 and 3 (UBL, Zawahiri, Omar) are still at large does not mean the other several hundred low-, middle- and high-level leadership figures we killed or captured are persona non grata or don't count. They count very much. Your assessment of B as a failure is inaccurate.
There still aren't "terrorist activities" taking place in Afghanistan. What "terrorist activities" meant was training, resourcing, strategic and operational planning, special project development (WMD), and other general safe haven and sanctuary functions. To say that these are still taking place in Afghanistan is pretty ignorant. If you meant bombings, killings, subversion, sabotage, etc, then yeah those are going on because of the insurgency. That is called warfare, not terrorism. The media and the administration both grossly misuse the terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" and it is reflected in your opinion. So your assessment of C is not accurate.
Now, for your assessment of US military adherence to the new COIN manual as well as the general concepts and prinicples of COIN, counter-guerrilla warfare and Foreign Internal Defense, I would agree that we suck. Our senior leadership, operational level leadership and most, if not all, tactical leaders are truly uneducated when it comes to knowledge, application and assessment of success or failure of those principles. We do not know our own doctrine, which is to say, we do not learn from the past. Our COIN/CG doctrine rests upon the successes of many famously successful military campaigns -- Malaya in particular. (I will not adress the political aspects because then we'd have to talk about the US Dept of State and IDAD strategy -- which does not exist because DoS has lost their institutional knowledge base of that concept. Or, at least they have chosen not to apply it to Iraq. Again, the adminstration is to blame. As great a woman as Condi is, she is no cabinet-level foreign sevice officer.)
The US military does not have a coherent FID/COIN/CG strategy in Iraq because we do not know it. The proponent agency (the Infantry school) does not teach it to lieutenants or captains. Therefore it will fail (it doesn't matter what the seniors learn at the war college or NDU because they are so far-removed from the citical nodes of engagement -- the tactical level -- in COIN/FID that they are in effect nullified). This is where things like the "strategic corporal" concept would be great if it were actually not just a bunch of lip service. USMC and Army risk-averse policies do not allow a "strat corporal" to exercise his supposed authority under that concept. Yes, we are keeping ourselves down by being dumb and careful. We are doing it to ourselves.

[Claymore]

Finally published...but they omitted most important sentences. It sucks

https://akocomm.us.army.mil/usapa/doctrine/DR_pubs/dr_aa/pdf/fm3_24.pdf

[adam]

Kevin,

Not sure that this link should have been put up. Its password protected and seems to be a US military website.

[Claymore]

Adam,
Is that also why they password protect this one too?
https://atiam.train.army.mil/soldierPortal/atia/adlsc/view/public/23285-1/FM/3-24/FM3-24.HTM

"DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTION: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited."

[adam]

Kevin,

Bounced again - passwords only. As you're saying its OK to be read it's very odd, it might be that I'm coming in on a non-US IP address.