(Cross posted at Daily Kos)
[Note: This is the first of a series of posts on the topic of fourth-generation warfare (4GW).]
If you read the Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker, perhaps you remember him quoting John Arquilla:
“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism.
“The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”
Well, that got my attention.
I’ve been reading some on 4GW, starting with what many believe is the seminal work on the subject: The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation. But more on that another time.
Back to John Arquilla, from an interview at the Institute of International Studies…
The social behavior of a network is quite different than a hierarchy, in that decision-making is often consensual in nature; that is, what people choose becomes the path they take. It’s not very centrally controlled by any means.
The most successful networks don’t have a step-by-step script of their actions, even though they have a sense of a great goal that they want to achieve. It’s a little bit like ants, who identify the carcass of a worm that they want to get. The word comes back to others, “the worm is over there,” and ants will send out many, many different trails. The ones that turn out to be the easiest, the quickest, turn out to be the ones that more people go to, but there’s an absolute multitude of trails that are set up.
Our work there is called swarmed intelligence. The people in the entomology business have figured out a lot about cross-connections and networking. Ants do it, of course, with their pheromones; we do it with our cell phones.
Arquilla goes on to make a lot of very interesting observations in this interview. Here’s an outline:
- Background … influence of parents … education … mentors … importance of ideas … issues of war and peace
- Challenges Posed by Networks …germ of ideas … collaboration … empowering of networks … organizational forms … swarming … military implications … decentralization
- The Structure of Networks … the story … embedded information … leaderless swarming … pulsing … technology … control versus ground-level empowerment … "dirtying" clean money … social ties
- Organizational Response … moving toward networks … 9/11 surprise as failure of imagination and organization … implications for the military … top sight … eBay style of command … empowering soldiers … morale and ethnical dimension
- Societal Networks … innovation in civil and uncivil organizations … limiting state power … consequences for the nation state … not chess but Go
- Conclusion … 9/11 … advice to students … prehistoric social norm of networking
Vietnam, Iraq, Soviet-Afghanistan, Lebanon, and others, are all examples of fourth generation warfare.
How do you fight an adversary like that and win? Arquilla is one guy who might have the answer.
I’d recommend reading Gwynne Dyer’s War for a military historian’s treatment of the entire subject. Excellent book. And the conclusion is that we need to give up war entirely, which sounds odd coming from a military historian and soldier.
Give up war entirely? As John Rogers would say, “Good luck with that.”
Another great quote from Arquilla:
Given what we know now about the “distorted intelligence” that doomed the Bush administration’s war effort, Arquilla’s comment takes on added relevancy.
Give up war entirely? As John Rogers would say, “Good luck with that.”
And when everyone has nukes? What about weapons that may be worse than nukes?
Dyer makes a great case for finding alternatives. War must end, or we will end.
I agree with everything you say. But MUST end and WILL end are two different propositions.
Humans have been on this earth for, what, 4 million years? And we’ve had perhaps a few thousand years of recorded history. That’s the blink of an eye.
The notion that we are all that advanced is one that I haven’t come to terms with yet.
“The notion that we are all that advanced is one that I haven’t come to terms with yet.”
Other than our view of the worth and the rights of women and children (which is significant, I’d say that only our technology has advanced since Socrates. Unfortunately, as ++ (and Dyer) suggest, if we don’t catch up with it in moral terms our technology will kill us.
This made me start thinking, especially the discussion on it at KOS, about the netroots vs. the GOP — a rigidly heirarchial organization if ever there was one.
I see this swarm of little ants with the same cause but no central direction eating away at an elephant.
[…] more talented people running it), they’re still faced with the historical fact that in 4th generation warfare, the smaller force wins by not losing and the larger force loses by not […]