And the first criticism that 4gw will have to confront is that it is based on shaky history. While the point is well-taken, it is worth noting that this is not the first time in military circles that good theory rests on lousy history. In his time, 1957, Samuel Huntington’s historical account of the relation between the Soldier and the State was at best fuzzy history; yet Huntington admirably succeeded in devising a much-needed normative theory of civil-military relations in democratic countries valid for the whole Cold War (whether the U.S. military should continue today to treat it as gospel is another question). Similarly, the historical foundations of 4gw theory are awkward at best: The “generational” periodization cannot fail to make any serious historian cringe, and a more rigorous genealogy should probably have followed the rough “revolution in guerrilla affairs” model outlined above. At the very least, the proponents of 4gw would have been better inspired to argue that, in the second half of the twentieth century, a new form of warfare became dominant due to a host of endogenous and exogenous factors: the increasing militarization of ideologies (Marxism yesterday and Islamism today), the constraints brought by weapons of mass destruction, the opportunities offered by the new weapons of mass communication, etc.
Be it as it may: As Lawrence Freedman, the dean of British strategic studies, pointed out recently, “the fact that 4gw is based on poor history, and does scant justice to the forms both regular and irregular warfare can take, is not in itself a reason for neglecting its prescriptive aspects.”18 4gw theory, which presents itself as a work in progress rather than a closed system, remains one of the most useful approaches to understand the grammar and logic of the current global jihad. And the Clausewitzian drill sergeants are all the less justified in dismissing 4gw in that, unlike other postmodern theoreticians, the 4gw warriors do not exhibit an a priori hostility toward Clausewitz.
Corn also takes a look at the crisis of legitimacy:
One clear shortcoming of 4gw theory is the axiom of a “crisis of legitimacy” of the state. For one thing, the “post-Westphalian” rhetoric so common since the end of the Cold War rests on an idealized vision of the Westphalian order, during which sovereignty was in fact never as total as some would assume; conversely, of the 150 states that have emerged since 1945, the majority have never been real states but “quasi-states.” Too much emphasis on “terrorism” as a product of the “crisis of legitimacy” of the state is wrong not just factually but heuristically as well, in that it leads analysts to overlook the importance of terrorism as a “force multiplier” for the (actual or potential rogue) state. Simply put, the axiom of a “legitimacy crisis” is an impediment to an analysis of the various modalities of “war by proxy”.19 Similarly, too much emphasis on “dispersion” can lead one to overlook the fact that “swarming” campaigns — like the recent “cartoon jihad” — are driven by “deep coalitions” of states, ios, and ngos.
Why is he talking about terrorism rather than 4GW? Seems like he is taking on a straw man. It doesn't matter if states are real or only "quasi"--the point is, are there real weaknesses with a large political community aiming at centralization but composed of peoples separated by cultures and beliefs? Are these cultural divisions possible sources of division and liable to loyalties being placed somewhere else besides the state in question? And why go back to World War 2? Why not look at the division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and see what happened (especially with the former Yugoslavia)? Can Balkanization and weakening of the state happen where there is no cultural homogeneity? What about the U.K. or the U.S.?
We can talk about war by proxy, and even take action against states supporting illegal actions, but isn't it also the case that such a relationship may be beneficial to both parties, or that non-statea actors can take advantage of the help being offered to them for their own purposes? I don't see how it is an impediment, even if those seeking to gain political control are only trying to establish a new state in place of the old.
Last but not least, one could certainly take the 4gw warriors to task regarding their editorial strategies: Having denounced the Western lumpen-intelligentsia for what it is (a Fifth Column), some 4gw theoreticians, blinded by anti-Bush passions, end up publishing their diatribes in the columns of the same lumpen-intelligentsia. True, William Lind on Antiwar.com is not nearly as bad as Jane Fonda on Hanoi TV, but given the iq differential, this “objective complicity” (as Marxists used to say) still is “worse than a crime — a mistake.” Just like it is time for Clausewitzians to realize that ours is the age of the “Three-Block War” (Krulak), and that Santa Clausewitz won’t be coming to town, it is time for 4gw warriors to grow up and accept the fact that — to update Donald Rumsfeld — “you go to war with the SecDef you have.”So 4gw theorists should stick to theorizing without trying to apply it to the real world and to make critiques of current policy accordingly? Or is Policy Review just too committed to the neo-con venture to admit that mistakes have been made since the very beginning?
It is time to “bring the state back in,” lest the 4gw and Netwar discourses end up being afflicted with the same disease as Network-Centric Warfare: namely, the “tacticisation of strategy.” But the return of the state will not be synonymous with a return to Clausewitz. For one thing, the “state” is not the transparent, self-evident, ahistorical concept that some strategists all too often assume. In the days of Clausewitz, at any rate, the State was close to Fichte’s “Geschlossene Handelstaat;” today, it is closer to Rosecrance’s “Virtual State.” For another, as the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review puts it, the Long War will have to be waged across the proverbial dime spectrum, now renamed dimefil (diplomacy, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, law enforcement). Old Carl may have had a few interesting things to say about counterinsurgency (coin), but he never ventured beyond the military dimension (in short, and to put it in modern parlance: it’s coin and dime, stupid).If anything, one should recognize that the modern nation-state is not the only legitimate form of political community, and that the best-course of action may not be to waste resources to reinforce a decaying state. Secondly, if relocalization is not taken seroiusly as an alternative (and the rationale behind it not understood) then one will simply be befuddled when all attempts to solve what ails the state (including this one) through excessive central planning (with the concomittant waste of money resources and reliance upon bureaucracy) inevitably fail.
The bottom line: because wars are now waged along the dimefil spectrum, the nonlinearity of war has increased exponentially. In his time, to be sure, Clausewitz had the intuition that — to put it simplistically – “fog and friction” combined to produce nonlinearity, but this idea was never fully developed (the “chameleon” imagery in On War does not quite make a chaos theory). Today, the main driver of nonlinearity is not military friction, but media contagion. The overarching metaphor is not so much mechanics as epidemiology. The new buzzword is not kinetics, but “memetics.” The main problem in the field out there is “mass disruption and mass contagion,” while the relevance of the Clausewitzian “fog and friction” is confined primarily to, well — the Beltway’s interagency “turf wars.”20
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